


Wreaths of Poppy Twined With Ivy

by wraithwitch



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Breaking the curse, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Magic, My footnotes had footnotes so I gave up, Post-Canon, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-13 18:49:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4533219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wraithwitch/pseuds/wraithwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Apparently this story wasn't as finished as I thought it was.)</p><p>Strange and Norrell seek to break the curse of Darkness, Misery and Solitude on the anniversary of its hundredth year. </p><p>In Hurtfew Abbey, all the clocks have stopped and all time is the same in the dark. But in England, the year is 1917, and all of Europe is at war.</p><p>(Some reference made to 'A Crown of Laurel & Ivy', but reading not essential.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

It had fallen to him to provide the blood of course, as Norrell would not - Strange wasn’t even certain the older magician could physically bring himself to do such a thing. Whilst Strange was not exactly accustomed to bleeding himself for the sake of a spell, he had done it before and wasn’t about to baulk at the idea now.

Norrell had fretted incessantly for two weeks that the spell was not right - that it could be refined further - that they should study further. This current argument was simply the latest in an endless line of spell-related obstacles that Strange had not only had to navigate, but coax or encourage Norrell through. _Finicky, stubborn old scholar,_ Strange had thought at the start. _Anyone would have thought he wanted to remain in the darkness…_

(This wasn’t true, but it is fair to say that the darkness had never grated upon the older magician as it sometimes did upon the younger. And why should it? Norrell was like a small owl, blinking his eyes from the comfort and security of his own dark little nest.)

Strange quirked an eyebrow at the shelves of Hurtfew’s library: they were not at their full strength but they had been replenished remarkably. A dozen were actual volumes that they had found (bought, bartered and in one case stolen) in their travels through the Other Lands. But aside from that, the other space on the shelves was occupied solely with notebooks and papers - all full of the magicians’ own writings. They recorded faithfully the spells they had practiced in England (Norrell’s often adorned with precise, dull footnotes of excruciating detail) and they also recorded the places they had visited, the encounters they had there and what they had learnt. (It was well that Norrell had quite quickly overcome his old fear of setting imperfect thought to paper, or else Strange’s hand would have become irreparably cramped around his quill.)

The younger magician dryly remarked that from where he stood, it seemed they had done quite enough study already. 

“That is not so - as well you are aware. There is still the matter of where we shall return to once the curse is broken. Of course one assumes it is England, but there is nothing in the particulars to suggest such a thing. You were in Venice when the curse first affected you - who is to say we shall not arrive in Venice? Or Lost Hope? Or Africa? Or in a mountain or at the bottom of the ocean…”

“Add a skimmer of Gwent’s - whatsit - _Verum Loci Locus,”_ he offered, off the cuff. Strange was excellent when it came to remembering the magician who had first used or set down the spell in the old histories, but he could have a devil of a time remembering the specific names (many of which were fanciful and had nothing to do with the spell’s actual purpose.) “Put it between the Path and the First Key.”

“Gwent never used it in that way. You are forever bending spells to tasks they were not made for sir! I am very surprised that it hasn’t landed you…” Here Norrell tried to think of an awful and dire predicament, but his imagination was slow to furnish him with one.

“In a pillar of endless night?” Strange asked mildly, at exactly the same time Norrell finished, “In - in a _mountain_ before now.”

Both men regarded one another for several moments. Neither spoke.

Strange sighed. “I understand your reserve, believe me sir, I do. However I wish you’d stop going on about mountains and oceans! You know as well as I that the nagrienne within the Third Key prohibits such misfortune - it’s what it’s there for.”

Mr Norrell was perfectly aware of it, but as a child he had often had nightmares of being dropped down a well and buried by some malicious person: being stuck in a cave or buried by something held a particular horror for him. As soon as he realised there was a nagrienne in the Third Key preventing such a thing, he realised that should the spell go wrong _such a thing was possible._ It had haunted his thoughts regularly ever since. He shuddered. “It is a capital mistake to act when one’s data is both untried and suspect! It may be incorrect or simply not up to the task it’s called upon to…”

“Mr Norrell!” Strange snapped, his voice strained. “Might I remind you sir that we bow our heads to a schedule? Whilst I have enjoyed the past century I believe stomaching another three would be quite beyond me.” 

(For breaking a curse, the auspicious times are: a year and a day, one hundred years, four hundred, one thousand six hundred, and four thousand. There is no record even in the Other Lands of anyone surviving and breaking a curse older than that.)

The other gentleman had startled, and then looked fidgety which was the closest countenance he ever gave towards expressing contrition. “There is,” he offered quietly, “the matter of the vitae.”

Mr Strange’s eyes still showed a flicker of exasperation, but his smile was reassuring. “I have already told you that I am happy to oblige in...”

Mr Norrell’s voice was not raised, but his interruption had the sort of stubborn bluntness more commonly found in dry-stone walls. “Heart’s blood, Mr Strange - heart’s blood!” He rocked forward as he said it as if he could foist some sense onto his former pupil. “This is not a mere cut of the finger!”

“I quite agree,” said Strange with infuriating calmness. “But as you have frequently pointed out, Faery magic is imprecise - and it is exactly those imprecisions that we are seeking to take advantage of. The spell calls for a silver bowl of heart’s blood. Every drop within a man is ‘heart’s blood’ - what else should it possibly be? - but there’s no indication the bowl need be a large one. This means I merely make an incision on the inner-side of my arm and fill that little silver punch cup from the dinning-room cabinet…” A moment later, Strange’s face made a mild expression of distaste without him seeming to be aware of it. “My father insisted on being bled once a season by his doctor - did it all his life. It never afforded him any harm.” A touch of wormwood lurking in his tone suggested he’d rather wished it had. 

Strange remembered seeing the procedure several times in his boyhood: the doctor had held a thumb over the crook of the man’s elbow where the skin was pale and tender, and pressed down until the blue traceries that hid beneath the flesh swelled closer to the surface. Then Dr Braidwood had plucked up a knife with a tiny blade and made a precise and flicking motion against that spot of skin. Instantly a neat spring of red pulsed forth into the basin waiting beneath it on the table. The doctor had watched the blood until the puddle of red was deep enough to reach a specific indentation on the inside of the pottery. Then he’d pinched the little crimson mouth closed and bound a compress against it. 

Then entire process took - Strange remembered - exactly the time it took to eat an apple. (Although he’d been a boy when he’d marvelled at that fact and had never thought to wonder whether he might still eat an apple at quite the same rate…) He supposed it wasn’t important; the blood was the seventh and final Key in the spell, after that there was a phrase to utter and one’s will to exert and the magic was done. That, he felt certain, took less time than eating an apple - or even a hardboiled egg. “I really do not see the harm in it,” he concluded. 

Mr Norrell saw a very great deal of harm in it for a great many reasons. He did not like ‘untamed’ Faery magic. Of course most of the spells that Mr Norrell had employed in his life had come from Faeries originally; yet he considered them ‘tamed and corrected’ by centuries of study, use and refinement by English magicians. 

To faeries, magic was a wild wood of all seasons, it was grassland and moor, bog, fen and crag. To Norrell, magic was a perfectly tended garden: the flowers and trees had come from the wilderness once upon a time, but now they had been pruned and shaped to please an Englishman and be - as was right - subservient to his will. (That Strange treated magic as a once well-tended garden he frequently _encouraged_ to go to seed, still vexed his former tutor.) 

There was also the issue of the blood itself; Norrell was not keen on blood - he felt it ought keep to its proper place inside a person so that no fuss need be made about it. Blood got upon things - like books or clothes or floorboards - and then refused to come out again. It became an affront - an unwanted momento mori when it stained and reminded one of the fragility of life and how easily - in a visceral moment - it blossomed into death. 

Norrell re-set his posture as he had a thousand times before when he’d had dealings with the Admiralty or when he’d had to attend some society function and could not put it off. It was a slight stiffening of the shoulders and a raising of the head; it was not the rigid bearing of a soldier, it was more that of an unhappy swan who had one direction in mind and planned to reach it no matter who stood in the way. “You know, that the word used was itself imprecise? The spell calls for the blood of the heart, that is perfectly clear - the words…” here Mr Norrell voiced a phrase in Sidhe, “are explicit in that requirement. But as we have noted time and again in our travels, faeries have a wealth of metaphor and poetry within their language. The oldest tree in a wood is named the…” he said the phrase again - or something very like, “which we were told means Crowned Heart. And what of the unicorn or the white stag, they are commonly called…”

“Yes, yes,” Strange waved his hand, hoping to forestall the entire lecture. They both spoke a smattering of the Sidhe language, in the most common dialect at least. The language was very beautiful but incredibly vexing to learn, and the words they had each sought to commit to memory were very different. Strange strove for practicality, just as he had in the Peninsula. Learn to greet, swear, ask for shelter or food or directions, and know when someone is swindling you or means you harm. The rest will come in time. 

Norrell on the other hand was always interested in specific words. He couldn’t converse nor understand much spoken Sidhe, but write it down for him, or tell him a phrase that sounded like a poorly-cast skimmer and his ears pricked and his mind worked fast enough to shame a cat.

Three years ago, they had - as they frequently did - come to a new land: it was an island, perhaps half the size of southern England. It was ruled over by three separate monarchs who kept an uneasy truce due to their odd number and their unlikely situation. They all claimed dominion over the lost, forgotten and drowned to a greater or lesser extent; of the three, two were lords and one a lady. Of those two lords, one was old and one was young - and both desired the lady as their queen. Neither one of the three was strong enough to claim the isle on their own. The lords couldn’t join forces to kill their lady as it would leave them with only a rival and no queen. Nor could they war with each other, for the lady would be drawn to their weakness like a lioness to the kill. Had the lady herself professed a preference of one lord above the other, the stalemate might have ended, but for her own reasons she chose not to do so. It appeared she liked the older lord for his wit and joviality, and the younger for his poetry and face - and saw that pledging herself to either would be a disaster. So she remained the tireless diplomat and fulcrum that stopped their kingdoms tearing one another apart.

Strange met her upon the cliffs; she had walked into the darkness quite purposefully. Indeed, during their broken conversation both in Sidhe and English, it seemed the faery did not see the darkness nor the curse, she saw only Hurtfew Abbey. (It was because she primarily held dominion over the lost that she did not perceive the darkness as you or I might.)

She wore a ragged dress of cloud grey; her crown was spiked silver interwoven with soft feathers and dried sprigs of rosemary and juniper. Her hair was as silver as her crown, yet her face was young and her eyes clear. 

“Who is this - and what is here?  
Upon this blessed isle appear  
Stands a man of royal cheer!  
(Two they cross'd themselves for fear,  
The lords I’d most wish forgot!)  
But soft, I mused a little space;  
I said, "He has a charming face;  
King in his mercy lend him grace,  
This magi I have caught."

The faery’s Sidhe name readily translated as ‘Caught’ in English, which explained her wordplay, although much has been made by scholars of the possibility of her name also meaning ‘Court’ and how that might change the connotation of her words in the last line. Strange however makes no mention either within his personal notes nor within any of the Hurtfew Records of having being ‘courted’ by the faery; he notes only the meeting, the fact it was cordial, and her verve for poetry. 

The Lady Caught seemed to be taken with Strange and was very interested in his circumstance and asked to be told more. She was introduced to Norrell whom she found amusing in the extreme and treated (much to the gentleman’s discomfiture) like a child or favoured pet. Since she held dominion over the lost, all manner of things came to her and her kingdom like flotsam on a tide: she delighted in exploring them for herself - both for pleasure and as a way to evade her two suitors. Many years ago, she had found the ruins of a small chapel, which once must have been very finely crafted but now was worn and broken. 

Two things amongst all the ruins had remained: a beautiful stained-glass window, and a lengthy inscription carved beneath it. The glass depicted a Joan-of-Arc sort of figure: a maid with long dark hair and alarmingly flashing eyes, dressed in a blood red surcoat and silvered armour. She held a fine sword and stood triumphant upon a remarkably ugly beast she had just slain, but all about her the sky darkened and shadows swarmed. The inscription named her as ‘Black Keziah Agrace & Her Demon Blade Malaal’. She was a knight of the Raven King’s company who was cursed to eternal darkness after slaying one of the King’s enemies. She remained in the darkness for one hundred years before being freed by the King with the use of seven Keys. Around the inscription, intricately carved and ordered, were seven words and seven sigils. 

Norrell’s furious scribbling and Strange’s strangled utterance of, “Good God!” delighted the faery lady extremely and she clapped her hands together in glee. In truth she kept very little company save for the two faery lords Leyth and Surjed, and they were often so busy being flawlessly polite to one another or attentive to her that they quite forgot to show any other emotion. It was refreshing to have such naïvely open company.

The two magicians stayed on the isle for several weeks, Norrell scouring the chapel and making note of every detail, taking rubbings and sketching diagrams of all he saw. Strange spent much of his time with Lady Caught, allowing her to show him some of the marvels that had washed up or otherwise appeared in her kingdom. (Strange could not roam far without disrupting Norrell, so the lady simply ordered the fallen chapel to follow them at ninety paces, thereby keeping them all within the confines of the curse.) 

Strange was particularly taken with one of her favourite haunts: a singed and broken corner of what had once been a vast library. Strange’s enthusiasm wavered when he discovered the scrolls were predominantly in Greek or Persian, as Greek had baffled him when taught and Persian he knew not at all. The faery lady of course understood neither of these languages, and her chief pursuit was looking at the scrolls and imagining the stories they told based on the shapes the writing suggested to her. Strange proved adept at this game and they passed several very pleasant days there. At sundown Lady Caught gifted him a scroll to keep - without claim or obligation. It was, when Strange remembered to look at it back in Hurtfew, an essay by Hypatia on the relevance of certain numbers and the significance of their resonance within the world. It made a handsome addition to their library. 

“You will not take it amiss madam,” Strange said when they came to take their leave, “but whilst you have been kindness itself and the most charming of company any gentleman might wish for, I hope very much that I shall not see you again.” Here he looked across the isle’s coast and towards the endless sea: beneath the darkness to him it was the bruise-red colour of regret. “I am in truth so very tired of being lost,” he uttered quietly. “I wish to go home.” The view of that ocean was too much, for several moments Strange turned his head away and blinked his eyes; his right hand tremored and without thinking he curled it into a fist. Home was England and Ashfair and Arabella, and after over ninety years only one of those and a gravestone was a certainty.

Lady Caught smiled gently. “Seasons turn and time runs hither:  
Thoughts and longings dance and shiver.  
We are to our course set ever,  
So tides the ocean, so flows the river -  
Lost but not forgot…” 

She took up his hand and pressed a vial into it with an utterance of the Sidhe word that means ‘freely given’. “There is a cave some miles from here: the rocks hang like narrow teeth and glint like teeth too. The way is hard-won with blood and pain for any who make the journey. The walls of that cave glisten with the dew of hope thought lost. I gather it - and often it evaporates at my touch. Hope is easily lost, but often found again.” She looked at him and it was difficult to gauge her meaning; perhaps it was best described as the look of someone who was deciding whether to tell the linnet that its cage was open or whether to try to close the door again before the song-bird noticed. 

She sighed and looked at the hem of her gown. “Were you truly lost, it would be within my power to keep you here.” A rueful smile. “Instead I gave you the key to your freedom - seven keys in fact!” Another smile that began in sorrow but ended in triumph. “I am not sorry for it, Merileon.” (Whilst Norrell introduced himself as ‘Mr North-Sorrel’, Strange always introduced himself as ‘Merlin’ in the Other Lands. Lady Caught’s accent or perhaps some whim of pronunciation rendered it a little more unfamiliar.) “In time, should you ever wish it, you know you have only to lose yourself to find me.” For a moment it looked as if she might lean upon tiptoe to kiss his cheek… But she thought better of it, and instead turned upon her heel and walked away along the cliffs, her silver hair and her grey gown making her look like a stray wisp of cloud.

The time since then had almost entirely been spent upon understanding the exact purpose of the Seven Keys gifted by the Raven King that had freed Keziah Agrace from her solitude of darkness.

(There were, although it was not realised at the time, mentions of Keziah in the notes in the new Hurtfew library. She is the Dark Maiden, referenced in ‘The King’s Company’, the Knight of the Flowing Locks from the poem ‘Lord Mag Merrog of the South’, and the Knight of the Demon Sword in two other fragments of song. It appeared that in Agrace at least, Keziah was a very prominent member of the King’s coterie and a knight well-known for her loyalty, ferocity, and hatred of those hell-born.)


	2. Chapter 2

“We are in Faery,” Strange told Norrell wearily after the argument had been running for some time. “Whilst I appreciate that a crowned oak, a white hart or a unicorn might do due diligence for our purpose, I don’t suppose that the land nor the magic will thank us.” 

Norrell had never been to war. As far as Strange knew, prior to their sojourn in Faery, Norrell had never left English soil. (There are a sect of Norrellites who refuse to leave England for this very reason, believing it makes them more competent magicians.)

Strange had been in foreign lands; he knew for example the unorthodox relationship Wellington had with the Spanish guerrillas and the common people who’s lives had been so rudely interrupted by the arrival of several armies. The Spanish all hated the French with a deep and abiding passion, but that did not make the alliance with England an entirely cordial one. The people certainly viewed a Frenchman or an Englishman in the same light when either stole their chickens. What did it matter the colour of the uniform then? The poor farmer still had an empty cook-pot. 

In a similar manner, Strange understood that taking the life of a faery creature and claiming it for their spell was more likely to doom the procedure than bless it. “I do not think that faery magic will appreciate the sacrifice of one of its prized creatures - unicorns and white harts are the provenance of faery lords and ladies after all. Supposing we were to ever find and capture one, we would be sure to earn the enmity of the lord or lady whose land it roamed. We’d run into a similar problem with the oak - trees here are just as opinionated as any other living thing.” 

Norrell looked deeply unhappy. 

“Even if the magic calls for a crowned heart in the abstract - which it might,” Strange concluded, “it will answer more readily to our own blood. It is our need after all, Mr Norrell. How could the magic refuse? It is our own sacrifice, not a levy we demand from the land.”

Strange’s argument was a valid one. There are many creatures within the Other Lands that do no belong to England. The dragon, the manticore, the griffin, the white hart and the unicorn are prime examples, and all have been claimed as servants by echelons of faery nobility in the same way that English nobles are allowed different species of hunting bird from peregrine to eagle.

Norrell tried one last time. “I remember reading in Stokesy that some faeries earnt favours from creatures such as unicorns and in their time of need the beast sacrificed itself on the faery’s behalf. There was a faery called Master Winterwolf who was so beloved by the animals upon his lands that they allowed him to take their lives with him into battle and use them whenever his own was threatened.”

Strange’s eyes were closed for a long moment, and between his brows were two little darts of a frown; he looked very much like a man who sought to tidy away the ache from inside his head. When he spoke his voice was soft and showed no sign of the turbulent thoughts that had run amok when Norrell was speaking. “Were we faery lords sir, it would be an excellent idea, but as it is I don’t see how it can be of benefit.” He caught Norrell’s eye and the cold blue swirls of worry that circled within his iris. “I could of course be mistaken - your reading has been more extensive than mine.” 

A hundred years ago, in England, Strange had said similar things many times and had to work hard not to let the bitter taste in his mouth mar his words over all the books in Hurtfew Norrell had denied him. But after the curse and the sacrifice of Norrell’s library, Strange found himself saying it to Norrell as a fact, uncoloured by rancour. And over the years, hearing it had soothed and pleased Norrell. Magic and knowledge were both very dear to him, and being told - in a round about way - that he had plenty of both - always quieted his agitation and reminded him of some notebook he ought re-read.

Norrell nodded, a forward bob of the head that made him look like a ruffled but now mollified swan. “I believe I made notes in the Troutscale memorandum,” he said to the library at large. “I shall check. Volume eight I think it was…”

Because many of the notebooks in Hurtfew’s new library were written more like magical day-books, there had been much discussion about how to order them and what to call then. ‘Notes: Vol I’ had been well and good when they started, but by ‘Notes: Vol XLVIII’ it was clear that something had to be done. 

On their travels they had come across a Nazerine or Night Market. It was thankfully, as the name suggested, held at night; their arrival on the outskirts of the meadows where it was set went largely unnoticed. In the middle of the meadows was a group of standing stones, and around this in a loose sort of spiral, spread the market stalls. There have been several tales that fancifully describe both the atmosphere of such a market and the wares on offer. No tale published in England has yet to do the experience of the Nazerine justice, although it is very true that one may sell one’s memories or the colour from one’s eyes, years of one’s life or one’s dreams for the most fantastical of items. 

All the time they spent in the market Norrell was in agonies: he was not just intrigued by everything he saw he was almost giddy, and yet he worried that one or the other of them would see something that charmed them so completely they would sell their sight or life or magic to possess it. Any time that the older magician wasn’t exclaiming, “Mr Strange - look sir!” he was reciting Ormskirk to himself or worrying that Strange’s attention had snagged for a moment longer than it ought upon some enchanted trinket or other. 

There are many tales of faery wares bringing misfortune: either the buyer bargains away something they are later desperately in need of, or the item itself causes them endless trouble. It must be said that these tales are purely cautionary in nature and may be treated in the same way as sailor’s tales of mermaids and sirens. Magic, like the sea, is vast and powerful: both hold mortal danger for the unwary within their depths.

At the market, Norrell found a bookseller. (This was, many would agree, something only Mr Norrell could achieve.) However this merchant was chiefly in the habit of selling blank books: beautifully bound items with velum or fine milled flax-paper pages. Their bindings too were extraordinary: cloth, leather, snakeskin, bark, ever-green leaves, drake scales, cobwebs, starlight, shadow, feathers, fur, butterfly wings. Whatever the binding it was perfectly placed and preserved: one blush-cream book for example had the slight scent and the smooth tingling velvet of rose petals under the reader’s fingertips; it would not mar nor the petals wither no matter how often it was handled. 

Strange was not aware that Mr Norrell had actually made a purchase from the market until the next morning at Hurtfew when a very large and heavy chest was delivered to the front door and heaved into the stone-flagged hallway. It was full of empty books, each bound in exquisite and impossible substances. (Although, Strange noticed, that the books they had seemed to be bound in the odder sorts of things. Green beetle wings. Bee’s fur. Nettle leaf. Frogskin. Leather the colour of vexation or rue, cloth the colour of drowning. From this, and from the fact Mr Norrell seemed so cheerful, Strange concluded that the faery had got rather the worse deal and the magician had - if not outright swindled - certainly taken advantage.) 

It had come as no surprise to Strange to learn that Norrell could be like an advocate upon occasion, arguing the letter of the law and finding the smallest of gaps between what was meant and what was said through which to wriggle, minnow-like, to a perfectly reasonable and sound conclusion no one had meant nor even considered. Strange wondered briefly how Norrell had ‘minnowed’ at the bookseller, but soon became distracted by the books themselves as they were pulled from the chest. They had fallen to arranging the unfilled books by colour or texture or theme, and Hurtfew’s library took on the habit also. Thus the dark oak shelves acquired fanciful names like ‘Scarab’ or ‘Hive’, ‘Regret’, ‘Hailstorm’ or ‘Kelpie’.

As the time dwindled and the day drew nearer, Norrell became quieter. Whilst he still brought up points of the spell that troubled him (namely: all) and mentioned possible refinements, he did so with a diffident air. He no longer argued with Strange nor spoke explicitly against the spell itself; a piece of his owlish little heart that had fought the inevitable so vigorously, finally recognised it for what it was. Strange would cast the spell and attempt to break the curse - it would happen no matter Norrell’s reservations. It was as inexorable as the tide: the older magician could either stand with Strange and prepare, or he could scowl as they were both swept out to sea.

Jonathan Strange, if he noticed the other gentleman’s change of attitude, did not comment upon it. His own spirit was restless; he found he could scarcely sit at a table to read before he was discontent with the chair or the book or how his legs were arranged. Strange took to walking tireless circuits around Hurtfew, sometimes with a book in one hand and a candle in the other. The candle flame danced in the breeze as he strode and proved all but impossible to read by, so he employed Atherton’s _Lumin_ instead: it manifested as a soft golden glow that hung in the air about him like the last rays of a summer sunset. 

Just as prisoners are most restless before their parole, and sailors most rowdy before port, so Strange was similarly affected. He had endured the darkness for ninety nine years, fifty one weeks, and three days. But of all those endless nights, it seemed the final four were the longest.

Within Hurtfew, where the clocks had not chimed for almost a century, time still turned - even if no cog or spring was in motion to mark it. The morning dawned: the darkness did not noticeably change around Hurtfew, but within their separate bedchambers (Oak and Ash Tree) the two magicians opened their eyes and knew - with the sort of certainty one is often given in dreams - that it was the dawn of their final day.

When they met in the kitchen for breakfast they regarded one another with some surprise, yet said nothing. They had both washed, shaved, and then dressed diligently for the occasion. Norrell looked as he had back in London when he had been going to meet with members of the Admiralty, or had been invited (much to his chagrin) to the Earl of Bath’s summer ball. The buckles on his shoes were polished silver, not pinchbeck, and his stockings were a fine cream silk. His breeches were chestnut velvet, his waistcoat a beautiful wheat-green brocade, and his coat a deeper hazel-green adorned with silver buttons. His best periwig had been brushed and powdered; it crowned his head like an exceptionally well behaved cloud, trailing a curled tail at the back of his collar. It was only when one looked very closely that one realised the pattern on the brocade waistcoat was in fact a ballad to a holly tree written in a faery alphabet very similar to the Celtic Ogham. Also that the silk of the stockings had been woven by spiders.

Strange wore polished riding boots and storm-grey breeches; his waistcoat was a blue indigo jacquard the exact pattern of which changed slightly each time one took one’s eyes from it. Atop that, he wore his banyan. He’d not put it on nor even looked at it in over ninety-eight years. After Venice, The Gentleman and the curse had all but succeeded in killing him, Strange had lost himself to dreams and rain-soaked fever. When he’d regained his strength he’d folded the housecoat away in a draw with a handful of cedar-wood shavings, unable either to destroy it or quite bear the sight of it. That morning however he’d opened the draw and pulled out the black damask: he’d looked at it with a certain satisfaction and a flicker of his usual smile as if to say, _‘Ah! Time to finish what we started sir, is it not?’_

Thus splendidly attired, the two magicians ate breakfast at the scrub-worn table before the large hearth whose fire burnt in hues of rose and magenta. Two gentlemen who have always had the benefit of servants might be expected to fall upon very hard times and dissolute ways when left alone with no one to care for them in such an old, grand house. But when those gentlemen are magicians, things resolve themselves rather differently. 

To be sure, at the beginning they found their situation difficult, but they’d adapted admirably given time - and they’d had nothing but. Hurtfew had adapted with them: the labyrinth that lead to the library was now capable of sprouting thorns that wrapped about any unfortunate who did not know how to navigate its corridors. The hearths within the kitchen, library, first drawing room and each of their bedrooms would light with the utterance of a single Sidhe word (and each fire burnt a slightly different colour.) Similarly, water within a pot could be called to the boil in an instant, which allowed them each to wash, shave or make tea with a fraction of the trouble it might otherwise have afforded them. 

Not all the changes were beneficial however: the scullery had been locked for seventy years for reasons neither magician liked to be reminded of. It frequently snowed within the Birch bedchamber and nothing either magician had attempted could dissuade it. 

Neither of them had ever been able to countenance the idea of a faery servant without feeling somewhat queasy, but that did not mean they didn’t employ lesser beings to aid them. A bannik summoned into a large copper tub would, simply by its playful nature and natural movements, wash any linens set in the tub with it. The grand candelabras within the kitchen and library were festooned with cinnamon bark, juniper and wyst (a tree found exclusively in Faery) to encourage aetherlings to nest there and so provide an extra source of light and save on candles. 

During Strange’s convalescence after they had vanished from England, Norrell had attempted culinary magic of a type Hugh Shakeshaft mentioned in his _Satiricon Revised._ The results had proved not only poor, but completely inedible. After they had been forced to subsist on nothing but withered turnips from the winter store or go without for three days, Strange’s borrowed strength was waning and he began to relapse. In fear once more for Strange’s life (and after it had been secured only days before!) Norrell did a reckless and hideously prosaic sort of spell of exactly the kind he’d been accused of when he first came to London. It was not washing laundry; it was in fact the arcane equivalent of setting up a standing order with a grocer. 

It had shamed and embarrassed Norrell beyond recounting, right up until he had placed the tray beside Strange as he lay in bed, wan and wretched. Strange’s gaze had flickered over the fare, the encroaching edges of fever skewing his sight. But then he had looked at it again, and at last his hand had reached unsteadily for a slice of acorn-bread. (He’d managed nothing more than half a slice and a cup of tea, but that had been more than had passed his lips in the five days previous.) 

The modified spell of election remained in effect for all the years the magicians spent in the Other Lands. Scholars know this because after several years of merely summoning food each week and returning odd items of equivalent value in their place, the magicians and the faery concerned (Henri Brioche who served as a lowly cook in one of the Castles of the Five) began a correspondence which remains part of the Hurtfew Record. Henri began all his missives, ‘Greetings, oh blankets!’ and no one has been able to ascertain whether he actually believed a tapestry or coverlet responsible for the magic, whether this was a mistranslation from a different Faery dialect, or in fact if it was some sort of elaborate joke. Nevertheless, it is due to this longstanding arrangement that Hurtfew and the magicians were supplied with such staples as eggs, bread, milk and butter, game pie, pease pudding, salats roots and greens, bacon, fruits, stews, wine and jellies. 

That morning they sat down to whitebait and samphire omelette with juniper tea and a glass of oakleaf wine. When they had finished their repast, the two magicians once again stared at one another, each splendidly groomed in their carefully chosen outfits, neither speaking. It was as if both were thinking, ‘Well, I have not seen _you_ sir for a very long time!’ but recognised the twined truth and foolishness of such an observation, and so did not trouble to mention it.

Strange drained the last of his wine and stared at the reflections within his teacup, toying with it so the liquid shivered and the light danced.

Norrell was still holding onto the linen napkin he’d used to dab breakfast from his lips. Now he was holding the unfortunate rag and twisting it this way and that, wringing it between his small hands.

At length Strange noticed Norrell looking at him whilst he strangled his napkin. An unreadable though flickered within Strange’s eyes for a moment and then was lost behind an expressive twitch of the lips: one of his famous smiles framed with a sliver of self-mockery. “Well sir. Since we are dressed the part we’d best be about our business.” He spoke gently, in much the same way he’d spoken to Norrell when his tutor had at first been both trying to and trying not to hand him one of his precious books. 

Norrell didn’t reply, but he nodded, dropped the napkin and walked with Strange into the library to begin the long and final preparations of the Seven Keys.


	3. Chapter 3

For a moment he stood poised, his left arm held taut above the silver cup: he looked at the pale skin that covered his flesh and hid the pathways of blood beneath. He did not spare a single glance for the knife he grasped in his right hand, nor for Norrell who was holding the cup and concentrating on the skimmer they’d added for stability.

Strange made the cut - a swift decisive motion: he knew the blood must flow cleanly and immediately if they were to appease the magic and that there was no room for error. The blade kissed open a line of brief agony; a little red smile appeared instantly - widened - and to his relief was followed by a steady rivulet of blood. The punch-cup was quickly filled, but then it was smaller than the basin his father had bled into so Strange didn’t give it a second thought. There wasn’t time to even roll down his coat and shirtsleeve from where he’d turned them above his elbow - the words must be spoken, the magic done now - _now!_

Strange spoke aloud and with great feeling but the phrase he repeated thrice was lost beneath an indescribable cacophony of sound. For the fourth time in its history, the library at Hurtfew experienced rain; only this time it was a rain of blood. The vitae within the bowl rushed into the air in a chaos of droplets spread thin and wide to fall once again upon the library in a shower of crimson. For a moment the air smelt of damp copper, of life and death entwined, and everything seemed soaked in red. It was there, and then it was gone. 

At the sound of the second refrain, a great whirlwind of leaves washed through the library: they were nothing but the memories and ghosts of leaves - no longer even autumnal corpses - rushing with a terrible sigh as if seeking to escape their graveyard within the cold winter wood. They were there, and then they were gone.

At Strange’s third cry, the darkness itself moved. Both magicians were so used to its velvet cloak about them that it was as monumental and disconcerting a thing as either of them had ever felt - as if they had been turned upside down and shook. For a moment they both dropped the threads of their thoughts, and the magic forked free. 

I should not say that both instantly regained their equilibrium, more truthful to report that each swiftly bullied their minds and the present moment to come to an accord that suited them. That time of spiralling amidst blood, phantasm leaves and fragmented darkness seemed to them both a separate eternity, but a pocket watch would have counted only two single seconds. Each magician forged his will to the purpose: for an instant, had an individual attuned to such things been present, both magicians seemed to wear crowns wrought of silver thorns, raven feathers and ivy so lush it sheened almost black. Both Strange and Norrell - one with quiet depth and one with fierce desperation - spoke the final word of the spell.

The darkness shattered like a scry-mirror dropped from a great height: and everything held within its confines shattered with it.


	4. Chapter 4

There was darkness - an all too familiar feeling. And yet he sensed this was a more personal darkness, like that of a dream before one awoke. Strange did not remember a dream that ever felt this uncomfortable: he ached quite fiercely as if he was all over bruises and would barely be able to stir on the morrow due to every single one of his muscles curling in upon themselves in protest of such rough treatment… 

In truth, now he thought on it, he’d felt remarkably similar back in the Peninsular when the edge of a cannon blast had caught him. A buffeting wind and roar would pick one up and throw one - a mixture of panic coupled with floating which would last forever - until that forever was rudely stolen by the cold ground greeting one’s back and punching the air from one’s lungs.

Now, as then, he was winded and seemed to be lying spread out upon the earth. There was a buzzing in his ears and a tingling numbness to his limbs which was likely just the shock of the thing; no doubt they would rouse themselves to smarting indignation soon enough. 

His eyes fluttered open but could not remain so: his eyelids struggled to bat away a piecing pain that sought to spear his ocular faculties and sear his brain to dust. He tried again and again until the stinging assault on his eyes lessened and resolved itself into an extraordinary and brilliant shade of unending blue. 

It was not the blue of detachment, neither innocence nor wisdom. He thought it might perhaps be the blue of memory… When it hit him, it hit like a second canon blast: _this was the blue of the sky._ He flung himself up like a beached salmon seeking its river, wild with a mixture of ecstasy stitched through with distress. 

They’d done it! They’d - hadn’t they? The darkness was gone! They must be home. Was this home? Where else could they possibly be? Where was Norrell?

He staggered to his feet, calling for Norrell, his voice sounding odd to his own ears as if he was whispering into a pewter tankard. He spun, the tails of his housecoat flapping in their own eddies, still looking for the other magician. For a moment - an instant, no more - Strange felt quite bewildered and alone without Norrell and the darkness. But his triumph - and with it the arrogance that he’d never quite managed to sweep from his character - overpowered everything else. 

He grinned. It was an expression that would have horrified London Society and worried anyone who cared about him. He’d worn that exact expression once before in Venice after he’d succeeded in summoning the green-coated Faery Gentleman for the first time. The Aureate Magicians would have understood his glee tinged with fervour, as would the Romans - they even had a word for such things: Sebastomania - although they would have thought him troubled by a god rather than victory. (The Greeks of course could have accommodated both in the person of Nike.)

His limbs were still shocked and shook about; they obeyed him but in a loose fashion such as they might have had he downed a decanter of brandy. He remained upright and was able to propel himself forward beneath the vault of that terrible - wonderful - breathe-taking blue, and so he didn’t have any attention spare to notice how his legs faltered, lurching him along like an animate scarecrow who was leaking stuffing with every step. 

Where on earth had Norrell got to? It would be just typical of the man if he… 

The bright, glorious, hurtful all-pervasive blue so full of defused light was making it hard to focus, but up ahead there was a small figure - a dark shape against the piercing heavenly cerulean. Was that Norrell? Strange tried to call out; instead of a ribbon of communication his voice sounded like a rag that had been scrubbed too hard and was now thin and full of holes. He lurched closer: the sky still did its best to blind or confuse him - suddenly the figure he’d taken for Norrell was scarcely four feet away. Another stride and he could have touched them on the nose. It was not Norrell, that much at least was clear. Strange squinted; the light seemed intent upon making him feel both drunk and barrel-fevered all at once.

The person before him was oddly dressed. Not outlandish exactly, but particular and not in the manner of any Englishman or woman he’d ever seen. Their form was petite and their face delicate - yet something about the set of their eyes and the cast of their cheekbones suggested they were not a native of Faery. The youth wore a bright crochet cap at a revolutionary angle atop dark hair cut in the manner of a medieval page. Keen grey eyes watched from beneath brows canted like birds. A small pink mouth had lips that suggested a dismayed angel’s harp. A dandy’s shirt was tied with an unusually thin, long black cravat. Dark pantaloons hung so wide they almost looked like a skirt. A belted canvas coat of dubious and unfashionable cut completed the ensemble.

Anyone who knew Jonathan Strange would have at one time or another commented upon how he attended to matters, which would naturally have included how he frequently did not attend to matters in the least. It was not entirely his fault; what made Strange such an extraordinary magician was what made him capable of being such poor company: he could follow one stray thread of thought or magic to its conclusion no matter the more petty everyday demands made upon his character. It was this ability which alas had the unfortunate side-effect of allowing society to believe he never cared for his wife. And from there it was but a small step to imagine he’d murdered her - he was a magician after all. Despite Norrell’s best efforts to make magic respectable, it was fated to be one of those professions burdened with both notoriety and acceptance but very little propriety. 

(Miss Lindhurst, in one of her less popular but no less pertinent essays argues the many similarities between magicians and whores. She theorises that society as a whole, no matter how adverse to the thought, will always require the services of both magic users and prostitutes - even if they are lowly, charlatan or pox-marked. She called it ‘the quasi-desire of the demimode’, a need found universally in humans for a mix of comfort and excitement. She likened Mr Norrell in his London vogue to Nell Gwen when she was entertaining Charles II. For this and several other less-than-flattering assertions, she is not popular in Norrellite circles.)

Strange acknowledged, somewhere at the back of his thoughts, that the stranger was a touch unlikely for England. But he considered it no more than that: his brain was still buoyant and fizzing from seeing the sun and the sky for the first time in a century. It was so many years ago to recall, but hadn’t it been a staple of conversation? Once upon a time hadn’t people said things such as, “It is very dull out today, sir. The sky is overcast…” or “It is too bright, mama, I do not care for it...” _What perfectly idiotic sentiments to hold, let alone voice,_ Strange thought. How could anyone ever tire of that marvellous blue, how subtle, how unbounded it was, and how diverting the clouds were in variety… 

It was infinitely hard to tear his gaze away from the sky, it was so pervasive - it was all about him in splendour! But when he finally did, he was perfectly sure within himself of the magic’s success and so addressed the youth before him in English. “Good morning,” he said with a pleasant smile. “Could you tell me, where exactly is this in England?” 

The young person stared at him with a look of confusion, the eyebrows stretched their delicate wings and the angel-harp mouth seemed to vacillate up and down between surprise and alarm. 

“I am a little lost,” Strange admitted with a valiant attempt at charm. “Might you tell me the name of the nearest town?” It occurred to him that he could be in Europe somewhere. He tried again asking where they were in his time-rusted Spanish, and then lack-lustre Italian. Lastly, much to his annoyance, he was forced to try French. This produced no effect save to deepen the look of incomprehension upon the stranger’s face. 

His smile flickered, dented, and then reasserted itself. He was obviously in some realm of Faery - but he was close to England, he had to be, he could _feel_ it. Perhaps an hour on the King’s Roads at most then… He bid the youth good day in Sidhe - one of the smattering of phrases he knew - and asked hopefully in English, “Where are the King’s Roads? The - do you understand me? - the Kings Roads. Kings Roads?” He felt so frustrated he wanted to shake the stranger and he supposed something in his expression might have suggested it because their eyes had become over-wide and they seemed to be upon the point of fleeing.

_Damn it._ He lifted his left hand and let his fingers brush his hair, tidying the stray curls a little flatter. “England or the King’s Roads,” he muttered bitterly, “I would have thought everyone might know where at least one of them was…” 

He stopped with a twitch as his curls pulled, tangled in something warm and sticky. He turned his head and glared at the hand that he still held aloft, four inches from his nose. It was a glistening red and smelled strongly of freshly forged metal. His gaze travelled along his arm, winched in by the snail-trails of alizarin-crimson that appeared to come from the sodden mass of half-rolled sleeve, clogged wetly about his elbow. His mouth sagged a little, but for some moments no sound emerged. At last - dry as a breath - Strange uttered a string of words. The first of them sounded like ivy, if ivy could speak, the next like the tendrils of a willow’s branches as they touched the ever-changing face of a brook. He faltered then, sagging, and just before he fell the last two words sounded remarkably like a sailor’s vulgar oath in plain English.

* * *

Viviane wished it would rain again - there was something cleansing about the rain. 

Two nights ago, after Billy, she had snuck out of the window in the hall and smoked a cigarette, cupping the little tobacco flame beneath her hand and feeling it warm her palm as the chill of the rain slanted ponderously upon her. She didn’t like the taste of the tobacco very much, it was rough and scorched her throat. But for a few minutes beneath the rain it made her feel dizzy and as if perhaps she could almost understand the language the raindrops drummed in their patter. 

She rested her head against the stones of Ashfair. “Hello,” she murmured, giving the wall a pat. She might have added more, but the smoke was making her feel a little sick. “Look after them,” she told the rain. “Please.” The rain struck merrily about and she couldn’t tell whether it had heard and was agreeing or just mocking her for her foolishness. She climbed awkwardly back in through the window, pausing only to stub the cigarette out in a collection of half-formed letters which she supposed had meaning to no one but her.

When Vivaine was young, one of her favourite school classes had been the Ancient History of Magic. There were tales of the Raven King and of Godbless and Stokesy, Winchester and Absalom. When she was eleven, her school taught the History of Modern Magic: those new stories were of Norrell and Strange, of Childermass and Segundus, of the Primary & Secondary York Societies and - of course - of Vinculus prior to his disappearance in 1873. 

Aged fourteen, she had optimistically whispered charms over a mixture of poppy heads, cat hair and a dead mouse for a day as she boiled them to sludge. She’d aimed to brew something significantly reduced that she could add to brandy to make a tincture. The result was not promising and even the scent of it made her want to retch. Her mother had thrown most of it out in disgust, but she’d managed to save a vial that she kept hidden in a draw beneath her stockings and debated drinking on a near-daily basis. 

Everyone already thought she was mad, and that was well enough in its own way (at least it had stopped the awful Bruce-Watt boy from pursuing her). But being mad in the eyes of others was not the same as having madness fixed within her own. 

"Don't you think wishing to be mad is mad enough?" her little sister had asked her. 

"No," Viviane retorted. "I shan't be mad enough until I can read what the wind is whispering to the sky." 

“You’ve always seen it,” the six-year-old complained. “I don’t see a speck of it. If you can see it you should already be able to read it. You’re just not trying,” Milly huffed out a sigh so deep her ringlets shivered with it. A pertinent look: evergreen eyes set beneath raven-wing brows. "You've given yourself a new name," she said, sounding weary and grown-up. "I can tell." 

"How can you tell?" 

"You've got that look." 

Viviane stared at her younger sibling, sharp pewter eyes clashing with prickly holly. 

Milly wasn't usually one to give in, but her elder sister was clever and mad and interesting and always looking to improve upon those three virtues, so Milly said, "Who are you now?" 

"Kit," Vivaine announced. "Like Marlowe - only worse." 

The younger girl seemed to consider for a moment or two and then accepted this. "So, are you going to keep wearing papa's gardening trousers, Kit?" Milly asked with interest.

She had not; she’d been forced to relinquish both her father’s clothes and her new name just as soon as her parents caught her at it. Milly, bless her, still called her elder sister Kit and was staunch in her opinion that she was destined to be a very great magician. Vivaine had almost come around to believe her, when the war started. After that all her yearnings to become a magician seemed selfish in the extreme, so she had done her best to forget them.

The world however would not permit her to abandon her dreams so completely and often threw odd happenstances into her path - as it did now.

It was Tuesday, and Viviane had been on her way back to the hospital after meeting Emmy at Clovis’s Tea House for lunch. She hadn’t expected to see anyone much on the road to Ashfair and had been pondering whether to have a cigarette, when a gangly shadow hove into view. She knew the people of Clun, she’d lived there all her life and there wasn’t anyone in the parish or Dixon’s farm estate who looked like that - like a willow tree with angles. That meant it must be someone from the hospital. 

Her heart began to beat a little faster with a mixture of nervousness and acknowledged responsibility. It was one of the neurasthenics - it had to be - unsteady limbs and staring eyes were their stock in trade. Was it Billy? No - no, oh God let it not be Billy - she’d already stopped him from destroying himself once, she wasn’t certain she had the strength to go through it all again. Her prayers were answered, in a roundabout way: the tall person in the ragged black coat was not Billy nor anyone else she remembered seeing from Ashfair. 

He was remarkably pale: the only other person Viviane had seen with skin that pallid had in fact been dead. He stood and walked like Mr Sipsmith after he’d been cloistered in the White Dragon of Stowe all day. His hair was a little wild - his eyes exceedingly so - and he seemed distracted by the sky. Viviane had the oddest impression that he wished to attend to her but that the sky was forever interrupting and stealing his notice. He almost bumped into her before he managed to tack his straying attention upon her properly. He blinked her into focus and then smiled: it was a very charming smile, a little crooked but pleasing and self-assured. “Good day. Could you tell me, where exactly is this in England?”

All at once her mind was sectioned off into different honeycombs of contemplation with diligent bees as thoughts flitting from one to the other. Some thought-bees were still attending to that curiously beautiful and slightly broken smile, buoyed up with confidence. Some noted his unusual clothes, his unruly hair. Other bees buzzed about his question - _where exactly is this in England?_ \- and wondered how lost, inebriated or confused one had to be to ask such a thing - and how commonplace an occurrence it had to be that one asked so serenely? But most of her thought-bees were buzzing their loudest at the fact the man’s left arm was crimson and still steadily dripping. The man didn’t seem to be aware he was bleeding and instead fired off a sentence or two in several different languages - the only one of which Viviane recognised being French. _(Où suis-je?_ Where am I?) After that he said something in a lilting tongue that made her think of the Welsh that Matthew spoke at prayers - only this was even lighter and more silvery. The sounds fitted together like seamless music; it was the most beautiful stream of incomprehensible and utterly enchanting gibberish she’d ever heard in her life… 

Time seemed to have skipped ahead of her; the tall man was troubled, his hands squirming at his sides. “Do you understand me? _The Kings Roads._ Kings Roads!” He was so frantic that for a moment Viviane thought he would pounce upon her and try to worry the answer out of her like a terrier-pup with a rat. As soon as it had come the mood passed; the man seemed despondent now, mumbling to himself. 

Viviane opened her mouth once more: she wasn’t certain whether the Ward Bee or the Panicked Bee would make it to her mouth first. (The Ward Bee would have her say something authoritative yet calming before she tended to his arm, the Panicked Bee would just have her blurt out, ‘You’re bleeding!’ and then run to Ashfair shrieking for Sister Haplocke.) 

She never found out which bee flew fastest; at that moment the man caught sight of his left hand and realised he was bloody to the elbow. Expressions skimmed across his face so swiftly they barely alighted: surprise, confusion, concern - annoyance. He’d exhausted all of these and reached the calm of dismissal: he was saying words that sounded rich and green exactly how she’d always imagined the language of leaves to be when they spoke to one another on private matters… And then he collapsed without ceremony upon the ground, lying on the path like a discarded doll dropped by a careless child.


	5. Chapter 5

In 1887, Ashfair House, no. 31 Soho Square and the Hanover Square residence - all reappeared. 

They, like the Hurtfew Abbey estate, had disappeared when the magicians left England within the Black Tower. There are tales of the buildings being sighted through the latticed branches of winter trees on the solstice and other similar fancies. Jeremy John’s cat Bullfinch (looked after since his death by the cook Mrs Pennyworth,) proving that the children of Bast have their own pathways, was the only creature to behave as if no. 31 was still there, and would come and go as it pleased. 

For everyone else, Ashfair had vanished entirely and paths no longer led there. Norrell’s Hanover Square house, which had been at the end of the set, was a blank space that no one felt comfortable standing in. 31 Soho Square was a thin sliver of empty wall - perhaps a foot wide - between 30 and 32, that seemed to belong to neither house and was only traversable by cats.

When the three buildings reappeared, it was treated by many as a sign of great and grand happenstances. England was for a while awash with rampant speculation that the magicians would return - or might be dead - or indeed anything else in between. It has since been named (through tongue-in-cheek or whimsy) as the False Flowers of ’87, in reference to the hope and expectation that bloomed in England for the return of its two greatest modern magicians. Historians are fond of tying in other disasters and disappointments to that name - the failed harvest, the restless situation in Ireland and the awful outbreak of Cholera in the late Autumn, all of which made ’87 one of the most miserable in recent memory. (It was commonly agreed that the only good to come from the entire year was a story by Mr Conan Doyle about a consulting detective.)

Alas the reappearance of the magicians’ old dwellings meant very little, and had in any rate nothing to do with them. Strange and Norrell had bargained possessions and properties away quite early on in their travels through the Other Lands. (1821 for Norrell who’d never cared much for London anyhow. 1836 for the Soho Square house and 1859 for Ashfair, and that Strange only parted with to stop the Tatterdemalion King from gaining easy access to our world.) 

Stephen Black, the King and Nameless Lord of Lost Hope won Ashfair in a card game and was gifted Hanover and Soho Squares as a tithe shortly after in 1886. The Nameless Lord was embroiled at the time up to his flawlessly white neck-cloth, stopping a war between Lady Golden Drake of the East and her lover Lord Todd of the Many Tails. He did not immediately realise the significance of the three properties he held in his vaults. As soon as he knew, he sent them back to their correct places in England. In his mind it was not only the proper thing to do it was also a fitting gift: the magicians had been instrumental in gaining him his kingdom - a place that was truly his and truly home. It pleased him to return their homes to them, although neither magician benefited from the kindness. 

Soho Square became the offices of a rather dull publishing company that printed almanacs, concordances and other tedious things chiefly comprised of lists. The fate of Hanover Square was more interesting: it was set to become a gentleman’s club of the rowdier sort called the Nymph & Satyr, but funds arose - mostly from Lord Portishead’s estate - and the house was purchased for posterity with all of its furnishings. It was kept in trust (very like Sir John Soanes’s house) and the public may still visit it for a penny and see, hung in the hall, the oil painting by Mr Lawrence of the two magicians, or attend lectures on thaumaturgy and magical history there.

There were no heirs to claim Ashfair upon its return; Strange was absent presumed dead, Arabella had died in 1884. Henry Woodthorpe and his wife Sophronia were dead also and their son Nathaniel had lived in London since he was thirty and saw no reason to change his tune. 

It was not widely known and was never legally recognised, but for precisely seven days in the early winter of 1817, the absent Ashfair House did have an heir. 

For a long time Mrs Strange’s condition was not apparent, as her figure was such that the babe nestled very neatly within her and made scarcely a single move or complaint. Arabella’s understanding of the truth of the matter was the impetus for her return to England, and Lady Pole and the Greysteels were happy to accompany her. Arabella Strange disembarked at Portsmouth in June in the close company of Lady Pole and Miss Greysteel. The three took up residence together in a little house on the outskirts of Lewes, close to where Flora’s father and Aunt lived. 

On a bleak, blustery morning on the last day of October, assisted by Lady Pole and Flora, Arabella gave birth to an elfin, sickly little wisp of a thing. Fearful, yet uncertain why, she nursed and watched over it for seven days and seven nights without sleeping, a soft corona of silvered light playing about her brow and smiling down at the babe like a star all the while… 

She awoke with a start on the eighth morn to the tolling of the bells at St Tomas-a-Becket. When she looked at the babe cradled upon her breast it was pale and perfect and beautiful - and dead. She began to keen and hug it closer, whereupon the little corpse turned into moths the colour of the moon and scattered: a flock of tiny, fluttering ghosts.

Strange had remarked frequently to friends that when magic was being done nearby there was an inch of skin at the back of his neck that in response tingled and itched like a gnat bite. He’d told in passing too how rowan berries and salt cellars set his magic a little off kilter… But he never mentioned that when Arabella was unhappy, the mourning ring he wore on the fourth finger of his left hand became uncomfortably cold. 

Its presence was usually cool even in the balmy climes of Faery, and Strange had recognized its chill as a twin of his own dull ache and sorrow that Arabella was not by his side. On the once or twice the ring had cooled further he had always found a quiet room in which to scry with his silver dish, as if by looking upon her and murmuring, “Oh Belle, please don’t cry my love,” he might soothe her despite the fact she could neither see nor hear him. When he had gazed upon her he had seen her supporters also - Flora, Lady Pole, Dr and Aunt Greysteel… He’d told himself sternly to take comfort in the knowledge she was amongst friends, and then abruptly quit the room, the moonish light of the scrying spell winking out as the door closed behind him.

On the thirty-first of October, Strange was alarmed when the mourning ring manifested ice. 

That night, from within a mirror Strange saw his wife weeping in her bed, surrounded by a scattering of dead moths. He couldn’t see any cause to explain either her distress or the dead moths - and yet he felt they were of significance. He performed _Seeing Through The Eye of the Daughter of Heaven_ \- a very odd little spell that required one to meditate upon the sun and a feather set upon the pan of a weighing scale. Done in a slip-shod manner, it could tell a forged item from its genuine brethren - or vice-versa. Done correctly and meticulously, it would show the true and entire heart of a matter. 

The heart of Arabella’s matter split his own in two and cast both into dust to wither and die.

Jonathan Strange could not go to his wife, he could not even comfort her: he was within the darkness in the Other Lands on the far side of Hell on the marchlands of Agrace. The Raven King ruled in Agrace as he did in swathes of Faery and England, but for his own reasons he had not seen fit to build roads from Agrace to the other realms - least of all England. 

Strange had not even been there to hold Belle’s hand, let alone the babe’s. How might it have been different had he been there? He could have helped - he could have saved the child and stopped this misery, he was certain - what else was magic for? 

_WHAT ELSE WAS MAGIC FOR?_

His eyes became rivers he did not know how to stop. He struck his fist upon the silvered glass in a rage born of misery the depth of which he had not thought possible and was ignorant how to bear.

In Arabella’s room, the looking glass on the dressing table cracked with a sound like thunder. Startled, she looked up, but saw nothing but shattered fragments of her own raw-eyed reflection staring back at her.

At the very least, it would have cost Jonathan Strange all the colour from his hair and all the light from his eyes to force the tower of darkness from Agrace back to England. At the most, it would have cost him his mind, heart, and soul: hollowing him out, stripping him bare and finally - leisurely - destroying him.

There is a break in the Hurtfew Record from the 9th of November to the 2nd of December. There are no notes written by Strange and the notes written by Norrell are a sparse and nonsensical list:

9th This will fare very ill. I do not quite know how to limit him.  
10th Brandy - three bottles.  
11th Wine - three bottles.  
12th Employed Carlyle’s _End_ also Jeb Hellingly’s _Ward._  
13th Wine - four bottles.  
14th Brandy - three and a half bottles.  
15th Carlyle no longer effective. Hellingly’s _Ward_ still holds.  
16th There is not enough in the cellar to keep this up.  
17th Prepared a variation of Cadfael’s _Paregoric._  
18th -  
19th -  
20th He is awake again and remains quiet.  
21st He broke Hellingly’s _Ward_ and I am prevented from recasting it.  
22nd The muffling spell will not work. I confined him within the pantry in bands of salt and iron.  
23rd Henri Brioche was kind enough to send a poppy tincture.  
24th -  
25th -  
26th -  
27th -  
28th -  
29th He is awake, thank God. I only gave him two drops!  
30th I do not think the pantry will last.  
1st He was stretched upon the flagstones this morning having escaped the salt, iron and pantry, although the effort has cost him very dear. Why is he always so foolish as to batter himself against walls that should not be broken?  
2nd He remains abed. Hurtfew has moved once more.  
3rd Strange is himself again although still subdued and out of sorts. I have weakened Henri’s tincture by twelve and may employ it upon Strange’s wine as I see fit, depending upon his wildness or melancholy.

Norrell makes no note of the reason for Strange’s distress, and there is no definite evidence to suggest he knew any particulars. Whilst Norrell had a very great regard for his former pupil, he did not nor had ever viewed him as the most sanguine or sensible of souls. For all Norrell knew, Strange’s distemper was an echo of his disastrous Venetian experiments. 

Ashfair remained empty for twenty seven years as discussion flew back and forth - sometimes in the broadsheets and sometimes in the courts of law - as to what ought be done with the property and who had any right to it in the first place. 

For Ashfair at least, it is fortunate that Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the twenty eighth of July in 1914. As a deed it spelt untold misery for the world, but perversely was the saving grace of Ashfair which had been standing sad, abandoned and uninhabited for so long.

(Some argued that Ashfair should have been left to rot in the same way Starecross had in Maria Absalom’s time. However there was no indication Jonathan Strange ever meant such a fate for his family’s home. The government was certainly more interested in finding a use for the property in the current time rather than ignoring it in the oblique hope it might become more useful at a later one.) 

In November of 1914, Ashfair was commandeered and turned into a hospital for convalescing soldiers.

The First World War was, as all wars are, a peculiar mix of contradictions at first. The government prepared for the worst whilst encouraging the sentiment amongst the populous that it would all be over by Christmas. Pretty women handed out white feathers to men of age who weren’t in uniform. Posters showed young men bowling on village greens, and then those same young men lobbing grenades at the Hun as if the war was just an away-game of cricket. 

_It wasn’t a real war,_ everyone said. _It was just Johnny Foreigner playing up. But the army would give him a damn good hiding, all this nonsense would stop, and the lads would be back home in time for tea..._ But despite everyone’s certainty, it was not over by teatime or even by Christmas. The weeks dragged into months and the months became years… 

Young men came home for leave and were quiet and distant and did not quite seem to know where to put themselves. Sometimes they laughed at everything or became angry over trifling matters that never would have bothered them before. Sometimes they stood and stared at a loved one, or tasted bread and jam and found silent tears coursing down their cheeks because such simple goodness seemed lost to them now. 

In truth many of them were like victims of an enchantment: the world beyond the mud of the trenches no longer seemed real to them. It was real in its abstract way - like a painting or a memory, but they knew they could not live there any more than they could live within a dream or a storybook. (This did not, of course, dissuade a great many young men from losing themselves in trying.) 

The British Army had, since the Afghan embarrassment of 1842, a command of both Practical and Theoretical magicians and was highly unusual in that it allowed women within the Theoretical core. The brass insignia on their collars and caps was of a seven pointed star (a symbol that in heraldry had long been associated with secrets and magicians) and the letters on their epaulets were TM or PM. They were - unsurprisingly - commonly referred to as Merlins, and as a group were afforded very little respect. 

The problem was this: since England remained the only country in Europe to hold natural magic or magicians on its soil, the government felt the advantage ought be used against the enemy. However, English magicians were themselves disadvantaged because they had no books and so little notion how to wield the magic that flowed around them. Between the years of 1817-18, magic had saturated England: it had been written on the elements and many found they had an eye to read it. But most often those who saw it clearly were the antithesis of scholars (artists, children, women, vagabonds) and so the magic was not correctly recorded. The scholars themselves were, I’m sorry to say, universally a little arrogant: it was right that English magic should reveal itself to all Englishmen (and women, they supposed) because Englishmen were the most fitting race upon the globe to wield it. No other race held magic in their grasp because no other race had the grace and distinction of being English.

No one imagined that by the end of 1820 the only people reporting seeing things writ upon the sky were not magicians at all but visionary poets who had taken too much laudanum. (It is well documented that the Pre-Raphaelite School of arts was formed directly as a need to fill the void left when magic quieted once more in England.) It was of constant pain to theoretical magicians that England should have gone through a Magical Revival and profited so poorly from it. (They were not comforted by the thought that their pains were as nothing to the modern practical magician…)

Hurtfew Library - possibly the greatest and most comprehensive library of magical texts ever gathered, was gone. There were one or two works and fragments in existence; much was made of them to very little effect. After both Strange and Norrell vanished in 1817, several persons published books that purported to be a history of their lives with full disclosure of the magic they did. These were almost universally false: of all the volumes, only John Segundus’s _‘Life of Jonathan Strange’_ is accurate, and within that there are only six spells recorded in any detail, although reference is made to over forty more.

Ask any British Tommy about the Merlins and he will either sing you the popular music-hall ditty, _‘Watkin’s Stammer’_ or will tell you a story he heard of a young Merlin lost in No-mans-land who came back via the Kings Roads (sometimes with a company of Daoine Sidhe, sometimes with dead comrades, but always with his hair and eyes white and his reason quite utterly destroyed.)

 _Watkin’s Stammer_ tells of a Merlin ordered to transport a regiment to the front lines by magic. However he is nervous and stutters the spell: the soldiers arrive at the forward trenches but their heads and feet have magically swapped places and the soldiers are obliged to hop upon their heads towards the enemy. Predictably for music-hall, the song ends happily with the enemy routed and the soldiers restored to normal.

_Deary deary_  
_Deary me!_  
_My head is where my feet should be!_  
_My feet are waving on my neck_  
_Bloody Nora!_  
_Sodding heck!_  
_Here’s a muddle, here’s a stew_  
_The CO don’t know what to do -_  
_Gotta give a pounding to the Hun_  
_So ‘e tells me ‘Carry on!’_  
_‘Sir!’ I tell ‘im_  
_And salute -_  
_My fingers snapping to my boot!_  
_There I’m standing on me ‘ead_  
_Damn ‘is stammer when ‘e read!_  
_I’m at the Front_  
_An’ in a mess -_  
_How ‘e’ll fix it I can’t guess._  
_It’s too late now,_  
_But I’m learnin’ -_  
_Never travel_  
_Via Merlin!_

The truth of the matter was that whilst England had magicians, the magicians had very few spells they could perform reliably and (after the Linden-Skeggs incident in February 1915 when a Merlin attempted to obliterate the enemy lines at Ypres and succeeded in transforming both himself and the farmhouse where he was billeted into dry red sand that blew away on the breeze) they were forbidden from performing unauthorised spells. 

The nineteen spells they were permitted were called ‘The Quiver’ because the little book came stamped with an arrow, just like the whistles, compasses, bayonets and all the other pieces of kit given out to the army. 

The spells within the Quiver were what might be termed natural and pastoral: the moving of trees, the summoning of fog, or scrying via water and a silver dish. All of these were of course spells Strange performed for Wellington during the Peninsular Wars and the government was very pleased to use them again. The results pleased the government less so but that was not the fault of the magicians. Strange often complained how useless scrying was: it had gained no more usefulness in the ensuing century. Moving trees, rivers or hills had been of great advantage to Wellington, but was of far slighter advantage to Kitchener. Shells had obliterated the entire landscape from horizon to horizon in a way that cannon had never been capable of - there were simply no more hills or trees to move. Magic did have one lasting effect upon the war however, and that was the trenches. The spell for moving earth was the most frequently uttered spell in the entire history of magic - although the most sought after by the Theoretical Merlins was how to stop rain. The line, "There is nothing wrong with good English rain!" became a sort of ironic catch-phrase and enjoyed quite the vogue.

The Quiver’s list in its entirety was as follows:

Scry  
Block Scry (technically useless, since only the English had anyone capable of scrying)  
Move Earth  
Animate Earth  
Speak Tree  
Move Tree  
Create Fog  
Create Rain  
Speak Rock  
Create Road  
Disperse Road  
Sunder Stone  
Create Light  
Create Shadow  
Divert Water (didn’t affect rain, only rivers etc)  
Grow Thorns  
Gift of the King’s Speech (useful for talking to POWs)  
\----------------  
Scotch-Hop (to move a parcel of land to or from another place)  
Re-animate Dead  
\----------------

The last two spells were set about with strict lines of red ink warning that it was an offense punishable by court marshal to perform those spells unless ordered to by someone of the rank of Major or higher. 

Officially, there are only twenty-two instances of the re-animation spell being performed, although anecdotal evidence suggested it happened far more frequently and high command was reluctant to acknowledge it. From 1916-17 it was noted that a surprising number of the enemy killed had a crude symbol somewhere between a cross and a star cut into the back of their left hands. The POWs explained this was a charm to prevent the English _Hexenmeisters_ from calling them back to life and forcing them to betray their country. The symbol is not recorded as having any efficiency other than that of an incidental talisman to curb panic. It does however show that even if the British army did not respect them, the enemy certainly feared the Merlins.

Guns were notoriously unreliable around both the Theoretical and Practical magician soldiers. Alas, this did not extend to anyone else, it was only ever their own weapons that misfired. They collectively took up the habit of wearing a Lee Enfield bayonet as a sword and were both mocked and revered for going about their business with the blade as their only weapon. 

The well-documented exception to this rule was Madigan Springham Smythe: he was a Captain who was half-Scots and wholly insane. He cared not a whit for his own life or limb and was mentioned frequently in dispatches with a mixture of incredulity, pride and despair. He often wore a kilt of midnight blue which he dubbed ‘the King’s Own’ and he carried not a bayonet but a basket-hilted cutlass he called _Eithne._ He also wore a brace of flintlock pistols in a leather baldric strapped across his chest. For reasons nobody could understand, the flintlocks fired perfectly. 

Other well-know Merlins are: Cullum ‘Oracle’ McDuff who had an affinity for scrying no one else could match, Peter Clement-Jones who was in no small way responsible for the Christmas Truce of 1914, Alice Lovelace who protected the hospital at Ancre and is regarded by the locals and many veterans as a living saint, and the unknown soldier called ‘The Red Maid’ who was recorded by several witnesses as being at Marne, Ypres, Verdun and Arras, always with long dark hair, always dressed in uniform so blood-drenched it was crimson, and wielding a wicked looking sword. The Ministry made quite a concerted effort to find this last person, even though the idea of such a blood-thirsty individual being female and in the midst of battle frankly worried them more than they cared to admit. She was never discovered, but at the time one of the stories doing the rounds in the Hun’s trenches was of ‘the Poppy Maiden’: a woman who looked variously like a maid in a red dress, like a girl in a blood-soaked British tunic, or like a Valkyrie in armour and a red surcoat. Seeing her was invariably an omen of death.


	6. Chapter 6

He thought he might be lying on the floor, although it was a floor that seemed to float and move, and it smelled faintly of straw, horses and ancient cabbages, so perhaps it wasn’t a floor after all. He was not awake exactly, but for a short time he was aware. 

Beyond the hissing in his brain he heard the soft jingle of a harness, the creak of wheels and the snort of a pony. He must be in the Peninsular - that time at Salamanca when the shot had hit the wall of his billet and he’d been flung across the road amidst shards of masonry. One of the stone fragments had clouted him on the head and another kissed a little cut on his cheekbone beneath his right eye. Grant had joked that it was a duelling scar and one ought see the state of the wall... He heard voices, but neither of them was Grant and this bothered him a good deal. Where on earth had Grant got to?

“Hugh I’ve told you before, deliveries are via the kitchen and… I say, what have you got there?”

“Miss Dulac found him.”

“Did she indeed?” That voice had a certain superiority and a nasal cast to it; it sounded to Strange like the voice of every young obnoxious officer in the British Army who considered cards and brandy to be above the welfare of their men. 

“He was in Top Field.” That voice belonged to a young lady and came, to his surprise, from right beside him.

“What are we to do with him?” the officer sounded irritated.

She paused a little too long before answering and her tone was blocky and uneven like a poorly constructed wall. “He’s one of the neurasthenics. He’s hurt himself.” 

Strange had no idea what she was talking about, but he was quite certain she was lying. There was a Sidhe word he knew which (depending on the will behind it) either caused people to cast a sickly-green corona of light when they lied, or prevented them from lying altogether, sticking their tongues to the rooves of their mouths any time it occurred to them to try… 

Strange considered casting it, but his eyes were heavy and his lips cold - neither wished to open. Time turned dark and slipped away from him.

His senses eventually returned piecemeal, dragging their feet. The first was smell, although since he barely knew himself and certainly didn’t know any of the scents assaulting him it was all a bit abstract for a while. 

Vinegar, saleratus and rotten lemons… (Lye.) Copper kettles and warmed iron skillets, venison and sea water… (Blood.) Damp wool, sweat, cotton, tea, shaving foam and the memory of gunpowder… (Men - soldiers.) Sunlight, grass, trees and the faintest promise of rain… (England.)

That knowledge galvanised him to rigidity and his eyes snapped blindly open, his breath rasping through his throat. Was it really England? After so long was he truly returned? He’d dreamt of blue, changing and endless and exquisite - he did not want that memory in his head if he was still in the darkness - it would frustrate him to a far greater madness than Venice ever had.

The second sense was sound as he heard his own panicked breaths raking past his teeth and beyond that the varied noises of one hundred other souls lying in torments of agony, misery or boredom upon their identical narrow cots. It was not the sound of individuals, it was the cries within a flock, the hum of a hive: the quieter sounds of many making up a whole. Dimly he heard sounds of discomfiture and snippets of conversation - “I miss Mabel - when will she visit?” “I am tired of Whist - frankly I’m tired of everything…” “Have you seen the latest paper? The Times says that…” “What I wouldn’t give for a pint o’beer an’ a cheese toasty…”

For some moments Strange sunk himself in the music of all those yearning voices, and once more it seemed he must be back at Salamanca after that canon blast had knocked him for six. He imagined Hadley-Bright telling Wellington that Merlin was indisposed and his Grace being displeased in the extreme. He supposed he ought try to rouse himself: if he didn’t Wellington was certain to be more displeased - and Strange was so wrung out he thought there was only a finite measure of his Grace’s displeasure he could deal with. He tried to attend with greater strength to where he was and perceive it not as a collection of scents, shapes and chatter but as the world whose interaction might have bearing upon him (or at least his Grace’s mood.)

“His heartbeat’s erratic.” A pause. “For God’s sake, just hurry up and cut the damn sleeve off,” someone ordered. “It’s getting blood all over the blankets…”

That was the first thing Strange properly attended to and he was unhappy indeed when he puzzled out that such words were spoken very close-to and chiefly concerned him.

Jonathan Strange found his voice quite by accident; it was shaken and thin and dry as a dying tree: but any dead tree may become tinder. “Get rid of the blankets then!” he snarled. Strange had been through a lot wearing that banyan and had, foolishly, come to see it as a symbol of the twined wonder and terror of magic. What right had this fool to go about cutting up a gentleman’s clothes?

A tugging by his wounded arm and then a meek voice he thought he recognised. “The fabric is too thick, the scissors cannot manage it.” Strange could not be certain, but he had the impression the voice was not applying the scissors to his coat with the vigour or thoroughness they ought. Something in the tone - polite, serious but slightly vague - reminded him of Arabella when he asked her if she wished for such-or-such a thing. (And invariably she answered she did not, only she did - and told him contrariwise so he wouldn’t worry because she knew he needed time for books and magic and Norrell and she did not wish to bar his path in any of those endeavours.) And he, fool, had believed her smiles and attended to his books more than her eyes… A lifetime too late, and now he’d give all his magic just to have Belle back in his arms…

He stared at the closest shape leaning over him. “Where am I?” Most invalids asked that question with confusion - he asked it with belligerence. “Where is this?” That was almost an accusation, although whom he could be accusing or of what crime those present couldn’t say.

“Ashfair, outside Clun.”

He did not care for the voice but the revelation was a violent balm: he relaxed as if the tension had been driven out of him with a mallet and an iron spike. “Thank God,” Strange uttered. An instant later his brows canted down over oak-green eyes full of almost comedic suspicion as the world came into focus. “Who are you and what the devil are you doing in my house?”

Many nurses lectured on the importance of comforting a patient, but Dr Turling saw it as a false trail that lead to disaster. Better by far to be honest - even if that required a brutal edge. Patients were often like children who indulged in fantasies, it was best to disabuse them as soon as possible - healing was fraught with enough complications. “It’s not your house,” he said bluntly. “It’s a hospital.”

This did not placate the patient, instead it seemed to increase his agitation. (Sight at last was functioning well.) “Ashfair - by Clun in Shropshire. I think you’ll find it damn well is my house.” His assertion sounded faintly petulant. “Look - we’re in the breakfast room - are you trying to tell me I don’t recognise my own breakfast room?!” 

For all of Strange’s pride natural to a gentleman of his class, he was not a stupid man. He had never for example thought he had no need of tutelage or that he understood the entirety of English magic. Dr Turling however had an arrogance that was grander than Strange’s because he had (so he believed) the might of science and modern medicine behind him. “Miss Dulac, if you have quite finished making such a hash of things, perhaps you might wash the wound with carbolic so we can see what needs to be done?”

Strange reached the limit of his patience, which had never been especially long to start with. His house had been turned into some sort of field hospital, and now this impertinent medico with an unpleasant moustache was lording it over everyone as if he owned the place - it really was beyond the pale. He levered himself up with every intention of quitting the cot he’d been lain in.

“Lie back down,” the doctor barked, shoving Strange’s shoulder so he fell back against the blankets.

“I intend to be about my business,” Strange retorted in a voice so taut and cold it could tear off skin.

“You’ll do no such thing!” The medico sounded rather angry now; he was too pompous to heed the warning signs and viewed Strange as he did any other wilful patient.

Strange tried again to rise. “I really must insist,” he told the doctor, his voice like star-iron and icebergs. 

Things were set to go very badly when Viviane returned with a rag and a bowl of carbolic; she at least sensed the patient’s mounting ire. She put the bowl down and hurried to his side. “Please,” she said. “You mustn’t excite yourself so…”

He recognised her voice. “Madam! You - I know you!” His eyes narrowed and then widened again as her face slotted into the correct place in his memory. “I met you upon the road.”

“Yes,” Viviane agreed, offering a small smile. “You were in Top Field examining the sky.”

He grabbed both her hands in his, one of them pale, the other rust coloured and tacky with drying blood. “Madam, I entreat you, would you tell this - this _personage_ that…” He was looking at her earnestly, as if he trusted she had the power to intercede on his behalf or at least voice his petition in a language that the ‘personage’ would understand as it was clear to him that they’d pay his voice no heed at all.

“Unhand Miss Dulac this instant!”

“…that it is imperative I find my friend and former tutor…”

“Let go of her I said!”

He was gripping her hands very tightly and she could feel her flesh and his pressing against her bones; it didn’t hurt but it was far from comfortable. “You lost a lot of blood, surely it can wait…”

“…I do not know where he is, nor even if the magic returned him…”

“Where’s Tom or Matthew? Where are the bloody porters?”

“Might we send a telegram for him? That way you need not run about…”

“…I must discover if - what? A tele-? Is that a spell?”

The pink angel’s harp of her mouth opened, and, “Yes,” she said. But her eyes, pewter grey beneath their elegant bird-on-the-wing brows, did not agree.

In one instant his grip on her hands tightened and at the same time he recoiled from her. “Don’t lie to me.”

She ought to have been a great deal more scared than she was, but she’d spent the past eighteen months at Ashfair, caring for broken men who often did not know themselves, let alone where they were or that their fingers could grip hard enough to bruise when they were frightened and clutched at her. 

The scarecrow stranger was not panicked, but his eyes held fault-lines of madness. Viviane had always seen more than she ought, sometimes she saw thoughts or intentions before people acted on them. (They looked like peculiar lights or clouds around the person’s head.) When she’d volunteered at Ashfair, she’d realised she could see madness too: the person’s eyes were cracked - sometimes with gaping holes - just like shattered mirrors. 

He looked like a man who had traversed a great abyss, and was not in the mood to suffer fools who claimed that North was South or This Way was That. It hurt a little, but she did not pull her hands away, instead she sat on the very edge of the cot and told him, “You’re right; I’m sorry. Tell me what I may do to help.” 

The shards of his eyes - like tiny myriad leaves - believed her and his hands both pale and rust twitched loose their stranglehold. He frowned at his long fingers and the livid pink prints they had left around her hands and wrists - he let go of her as if she was a white-hot coal. “Forgive me - I - I…” The fault-lines cracked wider as he doubted himself and his behaviour and wondered if that had been the worst of it.

“It does not matter - I am not hurt.” That is what she had meant to say. But she only got as far as the first four words when three of the porters amassed about the bed - one of them pushing her quite roughly from her perch and spilling her to the floor.

 _“No!”_ It was close to a bellow. “How dare you treat a lady…” The stranger didn’t stop there, he had plenty to say and looked like an indignant and wing-broken crow that was about to attempt to swoop quite disastrously to her rescue. What rescue he might have provided was never discovered as that was the moment when the three porters all made a grab for him. He was wiry and tall and wriggled worse than a fish on a line, but three strong-shouldered porters, two at his limbs and one all but choking him in a hold about the chest and neck was more than could be easily borne. 

Not only Dr Turling but Sister Haplocke was at the bedside now: the Sister held what appeared to be a collection of plain leather straps, and Dr Turling was working to secure them about the cot and the patient. The first strap went across the man’s middle, trapping him to the cot like a butterfly beneath a long pin. The next strap was being worked round one of his ankles when he suddenly ceased to struggle. His eyes were half closed and his lips moved slightly as they would were he reciting a prayer. His other ankle was secured whilst he was quiescent.

“Is he gone mad with religion?” one of the porters asked his colleagues. 

“Oh, fanatic is he?” Matthew commented cheerfully.

Viviane had picked herself up and was brushing her skirts down to give her legs time to stop shaking. She glared at Thomas, the reason for her bruised behind and doubly bruised pride. “He’s a magician,” she said crossly in a tone that made it clear she thought everyone but she (and possibly the magician, at a push) were utterly deficient in reason, manners, wit and anything else a person needed to navigate the world.

Matthew Llewellyn originally came from a large family who lived in Merthys Tydfil. He had five sisters. He understood female ire - respected it even - but he wasn’t cowed by it. “Well, there had to be something, didn’t there? Do you think he’s one of those - which was it now, Strangings? - Strangeites! - that’s it. They’re all sorts of fanatics now aren’t they?”

Magicians with Strangeite leanings tended as a set to be younger than Norrellites. Because of this they also tended to be both more radical and more liberal in their thinking. Many people made the mistake of blaming Strange’s teachings or magical philosophy for this instead of blaming the idealism of youth.

The stranger opened his eyes again and looked in frank disbelief at the fact that only his head and one arm weren’t trussed in leather straps: he spooked and began to try to thrash about the bed despite the fact he was more than half secured and an orderly was still dragging upon his arm every time he strove to move it.

Viviane felt herself wash red; it was not a blush in her cheeks - it was a haze she could see all around her - it was rage. Her nails were digging into her palms as she made rigid fists at her side. Why couldn’t they see? That was not the way to handle him at all. It was the same with the neurasthenics. Push against them and they became reactive - often either catatonic or violent. Work with them and they were calmer, and in that calm they were more likely to find the pieces of themselves they had lost. 

Dr Turling had pushed against Billy, said he needed structure and discipline and a firm hand. Billy had responded by sneaking into the kitchen in the night and then out into the gardens beneath the cedars with a breadknife. The moon had whispered her worries and woken Viviane, setting her in pursuit in her nightdress and coat. Taking the breadknife from Billy hadn’t been especially hard; but keeping it from him as he sobbed, keened, begged and weakly flailed for it was the hardest thing she’d ever done. She never wanted to see another human grovel for death, and she grew quite fierce any time she perceived another being bullied onto that path. “Stop it!” It did not have the absolute volume of a shout but it was very strongly spoken. “Leave him alone - you’re making everything worse!”

The entire tableau had reached a nightmarish intensity; she was a second away from screaming blue bloody murder - a siren scream for the magician, for Billy, for all the neurasthenics, for the soldiers both here and in the trenches, for every poor soul stuck in the blighted broken carnival the world had become… And for herself last of all, who could see the hidden writings on the sky or amongst wind-traced wheat, amidst the patterns of stones or in the rain’s sly slant and couldn’t seem to do a damn thing about it - about any of it. 

The red mist about her began to feel physically hot, the air wavered as it will above a fire. She didn’t know what would have happened, but she did not think it would have ended well. It was one of several reasons why Viviane was very glad the day took a turn for the surreal. The final restraint was being buckled about the magician and his expression was caught somewhere between sick and mutinous - when a glorious thing happened.

The leather restraints began to shiver; they flickered for an instant or two and then, like snakes upon waking they stretched, twisted, and unwound themselves. The magician didn’t move, but he had a curiously crooked and somewhat hard smile plastered across his pale countenance. He watched the straps with wry satisfaction, and then the porters and doctor with outright hilarity - laughing in their faces as the straps refused even to be grasped or held let alone threaded back through their buckles. The staff struggled with the straps very determinedly, but when the straps started to writhe and curl about them, they lost their nerve and fled, the lengths of leather wriggling after them like resolute earthworms of unusual size.

The magician watched them, his hilarity dying down once more to a detached sort of amusement such as one might show when an acquaintance one dislikes exceedingly suffers some small misfortune. His gaze turned back to Viviane. “Thank you for not cutting my housecoat.”

“It’s a very fine coat.” It was not a very clever thing to say, but Viviane was quite at a loss to know what one said to a magician - especially one as wild and broken as this one. “Might I bandage your arm? I think it really ought have stitches,” she added, “but a dressing at least will stop you losing any more blood…”

“What?” The magician had been in the act of sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Oh, I healed that,” he said airily. 

“Is there anyone? That I could telegram I mean. Someone who could help you, or at least someone who might be glad to hear that you are all right.”

Her words arrested his movements; he sat on the edge of the mattress, his back a little stooped, his hands resting against the blankets. In an instant he seemed transformed from Puck to King Lear. “They’re dead,” he said softly, his voice drawn and hollow. “They’re all dead. Major Grant. De Lancey. Sir Walter. Hadley-Bright. Wellington. Henry. _Arabella…”_ He closed his eyes, trying to shutter away the pain and sudden unending horror of it. Of course he had known they were dead - how could they be otherwise? But the enormity of it hadn’t struck him until that instant, and now he was drowning in it.

“I’m sorry,” Viviane murmured. She wanted to comfort him, but the set of his shoulders broadcast quite clearly that the pain he felt was his and his alone and he would broach no interference until he had mastery of it and himself once more.

Since the incident with the leather straps, the rest of Ashfair Hospital had gone very quiet: the other soldiers felt as if they were spectators at the theatre and the limelight was set solidly upon the man in the ragged black coat. They did not talk, they barely breathed, they simply watched - enrapt. 

In this silence it was impossible to miss the sound of shoes upon the flagstones of the hall outside and then upon the boards of the room as Dr Turling reappeared. He’d reached the cot next-to-but-one, when Strange raised his head and glared at him, his eyes broken baleful green mirrors.

The fellow held his right hand aloft, his fingers clasping an unlikely object that appeared rather like an apothecary’s vial with a bodkin stuck on the top of it. Strange didn’t know what it was but knew he didn’t like the look of it - he liked the expression on the doctor’s face even less.

Viviane knew exactly what it was - a dose of morphia that would knock the magician quite insensible for the next six hours. “Dr Turling …”

The doctor had reached the other man and grabbed his arm in expectation of sinking the syringe needle into it.

The magician said a word: it was lilting and silvered and the most beautiful word Viviane had ever had nestled in the shell of her ear. It made her want to transform into a bird and fly away, or melt into rain and learn the secret pathways water takes when it flows through the earth.

“What the devil…?” Dr Turling was looking at his right hand. Instead of a syringe he held a clump of white and lilac petal’d poppies. In their form and leaves they held the faintest suggestion of the dream of a syringe.

Viviane didn’t know whether it was part of the spell, but when the magician stood and stepped past Dr Turling, the medico didn’t move and instead stayed staring at the handful of poppies he now clutched, mute and stupid with astonishment.

“The world has gone mad in my absence,” the magician complained to the room at large. His look became more focused and pointed squarely upon Viviane. “You, madam.”

She wasn’t certain if he required her name, but she gave it anyway. “Viviane.”

Something in that seemed to amuse him exceedingly, and his mouth canted up at the side as if he understood the world to be laughing at his expense. _“Viviane,”_ he muttered. _“And whom else should Merlin meet?”_ His amusement vanished, suddenly and entire as if it had been washed off him with a single swipe of a cloth. “You are a magician. It is a wonder to me how you bear these circumstances. Do you not have a tutor?”

“I… I’m a nurse,” she replied, as if that explained everything.

The oak-green eyes narrowed as if they thought this a very stupid thing and a signifier for all that was wrong with the world. “Indeed? Well. I must bid you good day and take my leave of you.” His words were courteous and brisk.

No one moved as the magician - who was smartly dressed beneath his tattered and bloody black coat - drew himself up to his full height and made some small motion with his hands. With that movement the whole world seemed to tense and hold its breath - waiting. A second later his hands flicked outwards and he disintegrated into a veil of black ash that flew upwards and disappeared.

It was swiftly decided by the majority of the company that the tall gentleman had been an actor. He’d been dressed fit to play Prospero (even if he was a little young) and that business with the smoke and the disappearing must have been a theatrical effect. They probably did it with mirrors. The business with the straps was harder to explain and the men spent the rest of the day trying to puzzle it out. They were in agreement however that the whole thing had been a morale-boosting stunt. Or perhaps an advertisement for a new play at the Pavilion in Leominster. Whichever it was, all the soldiers said enthusiastically it had been a jolly fine show.

It was only Viviane who did not wish to explain the events away, folding and tidying them from something fantastical into something merely prosaic. 

She was also the only one to think back to her lessons of Magical History and wonder if perhaps in their hour of need England had awoken and sent them not King Arthur, but Merlin instead.


	7. Chapter 7

The magic had carried him from Ashfair to the front hall at Hurtfew in a scattering of dark soot and a shivering of black coat-tails: had Lord Byron been alive to see it, he would have approved. (It seemed a dose of insanity and a century’s sojourn in the Other Lands had finally made Strange the sort of magus the poet could have believed in.)

Norrell was within his library: he was sitting in a chair by the fire, with tea and a book beside him when Strange dashed in. It was a picture so intensely familiar to Strange that for a moment he did not understand why it seemed wrong. (The answer was absurdly simple: the room was lit by sunlight, not aetherlings and candles, which gave it quite a different character.) The younger magician came rather inelegantly to a stop and stared at his colleague, bemused by his lack of reaction to the splendour of English land and sky all around them. By the fire Norrell was as serene as a koi pond, as if he had not been imprisoned within a pillar of darkness for a single day, never mind one hundred years. “We did it!” Strange blurted out. He’d been in the daylight for several hours, but every time he caught sight of the sky it was all he could do to prevent himself from dancing like a demented gypsy - he certainly couldn’t prevent himself from staring at it. (No doubt, given time, that endless blue would cease to amaze him and become commonplace once more, but he was at a loss to know when that might happen.)

“Yes.” Norrell agreed, glancing up from his book. “We did sir.” He looked self-satisfied; that smugness lent a roundness to his person until he resembled nothing so much as a small sun, radiating satisfaction. 

“Have you been outside, sir?”

“What? Oh, yes, indeed, I took a turn around the gardens. It was fine - very fine.” The sun was still beaming quietly to itself.

“You - you have not seen anyone then?” Strange could not believe Norrell would remain as sanguine had he actually seen how time had twisted the world in their absence.

“No.” A cloud dimmed the happy radiance as Norrell looked at the other magician properly, squinting through his spectacles. “You’re hurt sir!” He removed his reading glasses, put his book down and hurried forward. “Is that from the Seventh Key? We did the magic an hour ago, Mr Strange - dear me, why have you not bound it?”

Strange looked at his sleeve: his shirt was ruined, the cuff rust-red at his wrist. The house-coat too gleamed a little wetly in places, patches of it still damp with blood. “No - no, I healed it, it’s really no matter.”

Norrell looked relieved. “Well,” he said. “Mind you do not stain the books. The Selkie Journal still has marmalade on it.” (This was a very old complaint.) A thought occurred to him. “Where did you get to, sir? I tried to look for you, but, well, the - the usual matter arose.”

Strange had blocked Norrell’s prying via silver dish thrice (once when he was writing his book, once when he’d been locked in the pantry, and once after the incident with the Pinhoe egg) and it seemed to have stuck rather better than he’d meant. Norrell could never after see Strange in the silver dish of water unless he had first constructed Pale’s _Oculus Noster Omnipotens,_ the building of which took at least four hours. And (quite infuriatingly) the apparatus broke on completion of the spell and so had to be constructed anew each time.

“The magic put me at Ashfair. The house itself is still there...”

Norrell blinked, a hard snap of his blue eyes. “I thought you’d bargained it away, sir? After the third Nazareth, did you not...”

“I thought so too, but none the less, it is there.”

“Is...?”

“No! No,” he said with something like gratitude and a suppressed shudder. “There’s no trace of the Carcosan Yellow Sign.”

Norrell for a second looked almost nauseous with relief. “That is well then, is it not?” He tried to sound bright, but the attempt was too soon after thinking on the horrors that surrounded the Yellow Sign. “It - it is well for a gentleman to have his house,” he ended a little lamely.

Strange shook his head. “It seems it’s no longer my house, it’s a hospital.”

Norrell stared at him. “Hospital?”

He nodded.

“But - but they cannot do that!” The older magician was indignant. “It’s your house sir - your property! You are the second founder of magic in the modern age! This will not do at all. We must write - no, we shall visit - we shall go to Parliament and petition them to…”

“Did you know there’s a war on?”

“A…? Oh, I dare say it is the French - or is it the Dutch this time? That’s no matter, it’s no excuse for…”

“I rather think it is everyone, sir.” Strange raised his voice a little, cutting across Norrell’s continued talk of petitioning politicians and telling them their business.

The older magician did not comprehend the enormity of the conflict, because such an idea was so thoroughly alien to him there was no way for him to fit it in his head. “Everyone will have an opinion on it I dare say, kings and statesmen always do…”

“I do not think you take my meaning,” Strange said, and his voice had a tiredness, a pained quality that it had not held before. “As far as I can tell not only is all of Europe embroiled in the dispute but also the Ottomans, the Russians and the Colonials.”

Norrell gave a nervous laugh. “I think you’ll find you are mistaken sir. The war will not be as bad as that - not even the Raven King considered stretching his armies so thin!”

Strange wanted to say that he very much feared the world had grown far more than even he’d imagined in their absence, but he remained silent for some moments, appreciating Norrell’s neutral mention of the Raven King - a thing he did but very infrequently. “I’m certain you’re right, sir,” Strange acquiesced easily. He found it simpler to allow Norrell the illusion of being correct, especially when he was about to be proved so very wrong. “I shall scry,” he said, striding towards the hexagonal card table and the silver dish that still lay upon it. “That will put the matter in its correct perspective.” He couldn’t find a jug of water so plucked up a decanter of briar port and poured that into the bowl. He passed his hand once, twice, across the surface of the water, watching as the light rose from the wine-dark depths to rest at last like stars and dewdrops on the surface.

“I’m sure there is no need, Mr Strange…”

Norrell’s voice faded from his awareness, as the light from the vision washed across his eyes. He had expected bright coats, polished buttons and gold frogging; swords, guns, cannon and a great quantity of horses. He’d expected groups of wounded or weary soldiers too of course and canvas tents, supply trains and the usual disruption one gets upon a landscape when two armies meet in a town or valley to do battle.

There was a brass button with a crest upon it, but the coat it cleaved to was a dull green-grey, and rain and mud adhered to that like joyous bedfellows. And then Strange felt himself stand up and begin to trudge, sheltering beneath a dish-like metal hat and waxed gabardine, watching rats scurry for higher ground. He seemed to be in a very long and narrow ditch, the walls of which were a foot higher than his head. Rain fell, glinting off the bayonets held by soldiers hunched on wooden steps along one side of the ditch. His boots squelched in the quagmire; his feet felt cold and spongy - it was most unpleasant. Instinctively he called to mind Godbless’s _Targe_ but it did no take hold - it was as if he was in a dream - someone else’s dream. There seemed to be endless mud corridors; some had lopsided signposts that promised Piccadilly, Southwark or Brighton but lead nowhere at all except to further tunnels and mean earthen hovels - like the lowliest approximation of a brugh. All about him men huddled, some nursed tin mugs of weak tea or smoked odd little straight-pipes. Of a sudden he was above ground, although he could not account for how he had got there. He was glad of the open sky, but around him the landscape was dismal: nothing but a dead mire with charred tree stumps, metal thorns, bogs and endless, endless mud… 

_This must be Hell,_ he thought. _I wonder why Lucifer let it get in such a state? How does he hunt with his hounds in this?_

He half expected to hear a bugle call from a trumpet of nevercold brass-silver in the distance, calling the kerberi to heel. Instead there was a sigh on the foggy air followed by a staccato chatter. Time dragged its feet: he watched as small dark specks of something whistled across his line of vision and burrowed through his green-grey coat. He looked over his shoulder and saw the left side of his ribcage stream out behind him like a gaudy crimson scarf. His legs no longer held him; he dropped to the floor, bringing the silver bowl with him. The noise it made upon the flagstones of the library brought him back to himself.

“Mr Strange!”

“I - I’m… I’m all right,” he gasped. He was bruised and lain upon the floor, but he was in Hurtfew and not wherever - or whoever - he had been before. The mud had seeped back into the stones, the blood into his veins, and yet he felt the pull of both: he stared at his torso and even pressed a hand to it, expecting still to see a gaping hole and thin bloody ribbons.

“There is port all over the floor,” Norrell complained.

Strange looked: it was a spreading puddle, running in rusty rivulets along the joins of the stone, greedy bloody fingers reaching for him… He pushed himself out of its grasp, scuttling backwards in a confusion of arms and legs and coattails.

“Are you… quite well, Mr Strange?” The other magician’s voice had changed and acquired the slightly flat and concerned tone it always had when he feared Strange had gone mad again. 

Strange lifted his head to glare at him, snatching the hem of his coat out of the way of the puddle. _“Bloody port._ Did you not see? In the bowl, did you not see?” He realised even as he spoke that his voice had the taught quality of a badly strung violin: something was about to snap.

“I saw a very great quantity of mud, Mr Strange,” he said easily. “Indeed, I think you are making things up to be more than they are.” He smiled and offered his hand, helping Strange to his feet. “Have we not had enough excitement for one day already?”

Jonathan Strange wasn’t sure whether Norrell intellectually refused to acknowledge what he had seen, or if he physically couldn’t, as if it was a truth too large to swallow. “You are treating me as if I am afflicted,” he accused tiredly. “I am not.” He rubbed at his forehead, at the spike of pain nesting between his brows. “Although what I saw is quite enough to send any man to Bedlam…”

Norrell looked alarmed. “Jonathan,” he said quietly, going so far as to reach out a hand and touch the other man’s sleeve, “the magic we did today was very great. I myself am quite wearied by it. Do you not think it might be politic if we rest and deal with the world tomorrow?” A smile, smaller than his earlier sun-satisfied beams but pleased none the less. “After all, sir, it will still be here. We did it!” He gave Strange’s arm a little shake, the zenith of his display of excitement. “We came home!”

Strange managed a weak smile. “We did,” he said, swallowing back his unease and the hollow twist in his gut that told him the world had turned so far from what he knew that he would never find home again.

He retired to the Ash Tree bedchamber where he washed and changed his shirt; he ran a comb through his hair which had become somewhat disordered from the day’s activities. His hair was longer than would ever have been considered fashionable in London; although judging from what he’d seen of the present day style, curls as long as his bypassed Byronic and were firmly in the territory of Libertine. He supposed he ought get it cut, but he found it very hard to care what society might think of his unorthodox élan when the world was tearing itself apart. 

There was a little silver trinket dish on his dressing table that held lost buttons, half a shoe buckle and a blunt pocket-knife with an ivory handle that he employed to clean his nails. He tipped them all out and filled the dish with water from his wash-jug. He drew lines upon the water in snail-trails of silver light. He named the world and all its lands and oceans, then he dismissed those places that were not steeped in war: a depressingly large segment of the world remained. He divided the water again, seeking to know where the fighting was concentrated. From the northern edge of France, through Belgium, Germany, Austria and Hungry, pushing up into Russia and down to the Ottoman Empire the world was a swathe of bright blood. Strange rested his hands on the bureaux, his knuckles showing white, his lungs feeling constricted with the horror of it. There could not be fighting in all those places - surely? Enemy occupation perhaps, small skirmishes or resistance undoubtedly, but not _war._

The red pulsed brighter with every new division upon the surface of the water: it was not skirmishes or lone battles, it was full-scale industrialised slaughter. 

Strange wondered vaguely if he was going to be sick. It was a very peculiar feeling that affected him: it was as if he had called upon the house of a dear friend and found them dancing with the corpses of their freshly murdered neighbours. Confusion, revulsion, anger and a numb sort of despair all roiled coldly in his gut. His fingers dug into the bureaux, small splinters gathering under his nails. 

He spoke three words in Sidhe. “Give me the heart of it,” he charged the magic hoarsely, followed by another Sidhe word that held the whip-crack of command. 

There was a shift in the character of the room as if the candles had all burnt for an instant with flames of black and violet. Sitting on the bureaux top in the space between his clenched hands and the silver dish, was a brass tin. It was bigger than a snuff box, perhaps the size of a gentleman’s hipflask. The top was embossed with a woman’s face in a circle of laurel leaves. ‘Imperium Britannicum’ was at the top, ‘Christmas 1914’ at the bottom. Around the edges in a neo-Classical boarder were the names of various countries. With unsteady hands, Strange opened the tin. Inside was a brass seven pointed star, a battered tunic button, a burnt fragment of printed paper and something that (he supposed) must be the great-grandchild of a musket ball. The shot was deformed and had tatters of dark rust-hued matter clinging to it. Strange closed the tin and his eyes with a snap. He had demanded the heart of the matter: he was greyly certain that the shot at least had been though a heart. He swallowed several times, his hand hovering by his mouth, forcing the bile back down. For long moments after he lent against the chest of draws with his eyes closed and simply tried to remember how to breathe. 

He had spent days - weeks - years - thinking on his return to England. A homecoming sweeter than any draft of liquor and more satisfying than any crown. He had imagined many different outcomes, many different ‘new worlds’, but he had never - even in his darkest nights - imagined this. He had left the world with the doors wide open and magic rushing in. He had always assumed that the innate wonder and inventiveness that magic encouraged by its very presence would infect England, making it a place of miracles, beauty and awe. Instead it seemed that iron and steel had stolen the throne of the age: everywhere machines reigned and their purpose was destruction. He could not have been more sickened or astonished had he been told pocket-watches need be oiled with the blood of innocents for them to keep good time. He did not want to touch the tin again; he pocketed it it like a heron spearing a rotten fish.

Norrell might be slow to accept the state of the world (because Norrell had always preferred his library, cloistered away from the world) but Strange - by youth or temperament - had never needed such shelter. “It must be nice,” he murmured. “But I should be surprised if even Norrell can remain so blind forever.”

He was tired, and his body wanted nothing further than to take to its bed and sleep the next week through. But the magics had shown him atrocities, and he felt it as keenly as if the world itself had been screaming out in the language of Hell. There was no sleep to be had any more than there had been in the windmill with the dead Neapolitans. He scrubbed the back of his hand across his brow: he found the Raven King’s spell-working both tiresome and inelegant and if he ever met the little jack-a-nape he’d tell him so. Had he known the strife he’d encountered in accepting Vinculus’s prophecy… But then again, he had done it purely so he might show Arabella he had a profession. It was, if he was honest with himself, a bargain he would always make because it had been to please her. But Arabella was no more than a headstone in Clun churchyard, a note in various daybooks, a memory of moths and a place in his heart forever overrun with bluebells and forgetmenots. 

He stalked to the occasional table that served as a night-stand by his bed: there was a bottle of hawthorn claret and a small glass there: he filled the glass to the brim and drank it down. Its usual warmth didn’t burn his throat nor his gut. He poured another glass, drank it, and decanted a third. Dimly he acknowledged that it was a poor state of affairs when alcohol left no mark - Norrell would be put out and no doubt seek to confine him in a pantry for his own good. He picked up the glass and glared at the mirror: it was not Norrell he required, not for this, he needed a guide whose quiddity matched the age.


	8. Chapter 8

_White in the moon the long road lies,_  
_The moon stands blank above;_  
_White in the moon the long road lies_  
_That leads me from my love._  
_Still hangs the hedge without a gust,_  
_Still, still the shadows stay:_  
_My feet upon the moonlit dust_  
_Pursue the ceaseless way._  
_The world is round, so travellers tell,_  
_And straight though reach the track,_  
_Trudge on, trudge on, 'twill all be well,_  
_The way will guide one back._  
_But ere the circle homeward hies_  
_Far, far must it remove:_  
_White in the moon the long road lies_  
_That leads me from my love._

She had not been dreaming - or if she had she was not aware of it. But all of a sudden the poem whispered through her mind, and there was the magician: he was in the space between the boughs and branches of a little wood that had not been there before. Those young leaves were the tendrils of his hair caught in the breeze and the edge of those tall grasses marked the hem of his ragged coat. She could see the clouds of his thoughts flit across the sky of his head, the seasons of his passions weather in his heart, the acorns that were his eyes wither to sadness and spring again to joy.

It was all rather unusual, but she supposed dreams were, so why should this one prove the rule?

His eyes - she’d thought them broken mirrors reflecting the dance of leaves. Now they seemed more like the promise of rain or the memory of starlight, as if they were not a colour at all but an idea. Perhaps, she thought, they are the colour of magic - of his magic? 

She stepped through leaves and stars and broken mirrors until all about her was a pleasant green woodland. It was both masked and revealed by dappled moonlight, and seemed to belong to all seasons at once. There was a hansom fox sleeping in its den, its coat the bright red of toy soldiers. There were huge bluebells and forget-me-nots beside an ice-covered pond. There was a little willow tree, its branches covered in beautiful pale moths…

Rumbling like thunder, there was a word. She knew it had been spoken because the command of it rang through her bones, but she could not have said what the word was, nor even the sound, save that it had been in his voice.

“Madam, it’s not only forward but impolite to walk through another’s private thoughts without invitation.” His tone was mild and a little lazy, like a bored cousin telling off the youngest member of the family.

“I - there was a woodland…”

“Yes,” he said neutrally.

“Bluebells and a fox…”

“Yes,” he echoed, his voice a little tighter.

She sat up, scowling, rubbing the sleep from her face and reaching for the matches she knew to be beside the bed. She lit a lucifer and prodded it blindly at the wick of her reading candle, singing her fingers in the process. “You’re in the mirror,” she observed with a hint of wonder when her eyes had readjusted to the light. The looking-glass was long and narrow in a plain pine frame; it hung on the far wall and had perhaps once been a serving girl’s prize possession. The glass was cracked in one corner and the gilt was peeling in places; no one had bothered to care for it for a long time, which was why, she supposed, it still hung in her little attic room at Ashfair, down the hall from Sister Haplocke and the dormitory where the neurasthenics slept.

The left side of his mouth twitched into a not-quite smile. “Yes.” He looked away, at his hands first, and then into shadows further off that she couldn’t see. “It is quite the impropriety I’m sure,” he acknowledged briefly. “But I am not here for your person or your virtue. I am here for your knowledge and your magic.”

He was surrounded by thorns - no - he was manifesting thorns. The patterns on his waistcoat and the sleeves of his coat (not the black one from earlier but a dark blue one with a complicated collar) were putting out warning spiky tendrils as she watched. She opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, but he spoke suddenly from the glass, across the no-man’s-land of thorn and shadow. “I saw them. So many of them. They’re beyond counting!” His voice was pulled to breaking point. “I have seen war - I have fought before. But this!” Something in him snapped - he struck the surface of the mirror. As if the glass and distance had been nothing more substantial than a soap bubble, they burst - and he was there, in her little room, pacing, ranting and railing. 

“This is - it’s - it’s insufferable! Where are the magicians, madam? Where are the gentleman diplomats? Where are the common people who would stand and cry ‘ENOUGH!’?”

She understood his confusion addled with rage and shot through with despair - it was a state that had afflicted her often enough. Why had the governments not stopped the fighting? Oh, it had all seemed glorious and proper at the beginning no doubt. But no one wanted to fight any more - they’d all had three godforsaken miserable years of it. (If only the Generals hadn’t broken the Christmas Truce of ’14!) This magician wanted to know why his brethren had not sent the Hun to the far side of Hell. Or turned them into trees or cats or anything else incapable of operating a Maxim gun. As for the common people, most fought because their brother, friend or neighbour was beside them - and who could shrink from that? Those few whose morals were so stiff had been rounded up and put into asylums or prisons. (They did piece work for the war effort, and the phrase had mockingly been renamed ‘peace work’ by the papers.)

But all of that was too jumbled in her brain to articulate, so instead she said, “You’re Jonathan Strange. Confined to the Tower of Endless Night and vanished from this world in 1817.” Her eyes were accusatory, although in truth she was very cross with herself for not recognising him sooner. She’d known he was a magician and so infinitely strange - but it had seemed a leap too far to recognise he was actually Strange.

He stopped pacing, briefly. “You make me sound the dullest of encyclopaedic entries.”

“The History of Modern Magic is taught in schools. I wrote an essay lauding the Strangeite principles of magic above the Norrellite. Miss Hyde gave me honours, but then the headmaster forced her to give me the cane.”

“Hyde? There was a John Hyde…”

“Is Mr Norrell here too?”

“Certainly, he’s at Hurtfew.”

“And you were both truly in the darkness for one hundred years?”

One eyebrow twitched up. “It is you, madam who accused me of it.”

“Where did you go?”

“The Other Lands,” he said simply. “Our travel was quite extensive.” Something shifted behind his eyes, and his face became shadowed once more. “None of this is to the purpose - kindly stop distracting me madam.”

Had Viviane’s little sister (fifteen now, but still little to her) been there to witness her cram all of her curiosity back into her brain as messily as she neatly folded her hands into her lap, she would have clapped. Viviane, dark bobbed hair and full night-gown conspiring to make her look like a medieval page reluctant to rise for chapel, sat up straighter and looked at the magician quite squarely, pewter eyes serious as storm clouds. “What do you need, sir?”

He scowled at her; whilst it was clear he had come there with a purpose, he had not perhaps thought that purpose through very far. “Who is on the throne?” he demanded.

“King George.”

He stifled a laugh. “George is it? Have there been nothing but Georges?”

“No… there was William, then Victoria for a very long time. And Edward for a few years.”

Strange made a non-committal noise, not very much interested. “And who is it that commands the army?”

She did not entirely understand the question. “The king?”

A brief, false smile. “I dare say, but who has the actual running of it?”

“It was Kitchener, but it’s Field Marshal Haig now.”

“He has a magician, I presume?”

She made a loose gesture with her head and shoulders, more of a roll than a shrug. “He has entire companies of both Theoretical and Practical magicians.”

Strange was very still. “The enemy - do they have magicians also?”

She shook her head. “No. The Russians and the Americans claim to have Shamans, but no one is entirely certain what that means. And for the Americans at least, I believe it’s thought of as very savage and improper. They only declared war nine days ago, they’d been neutral until then.”

He looked at her. “These Isles are still the only in the world to hold magic in their soil as a certainty?”

“Yes.”

He flung his arms against the foot of her bedframe, all the better to grip it and lean over the rail in ire. “Why are we at war? Why has there been war for…”

“Three years,” she muttered.

“Three years!” His ire evaporated to leave behind confusion that bordered hurt. “I opened the doors! After all I’d been denied I thought at least that would be my legacy. Stone speaks to tree, river speaks to sky - it was the Raven King’s message after all, I thought at least it would be understood…” His disappointment was palpable.

Viviane tried to swallow past the jagged lump in her throat. “You began the Revival. But after you left, it faded within three years. There were no books, you see. And everyone was so confident that magic was here to stay forever that they didn’t bother to note it down much. Miss Hyde always thought they were a little drunk on it - practical magic I mean. When magic was written on the elements no one bothered to record it in detail because they thought it would always be there - also,” she fidgeted, “those who could see it most clearly were not generally scholars.”

“I opened the doors between worlds so magic might be written on the sky - a legacy for every English man, woman and child - and no one thought to write it down?” He seemed unequal to the task of believing such an imbecilic thing had happened. “What of the York Society?”

“The Second York Society were predominately Norrellite - they spent rather a lot of time arguing over which spells were proper and ought be practiced and which had no place in modern magic. They produced Foxcastle’s Codex, but that was simply a list of the spells they agreed might be called true modern magic. Miss Hyde said we only know perhaps thirty of the thousands mentioned.”

“John Segundus!” he exclaimed suddenly.

“He wrote a marvelous biography of your life. That gives the details of six spells, although it mentions many more.”

“He didn’t publish a book of magic? He or the other fellow - Honeyfoot.”

“Mr Segundas died of pneumonia in 1820 - it’s accounted a very great tragedy as everyone’s certain he would have written a wonderful book of magic. He’s thought of rather like Keats.”

“What of John Childermass?” Strange felt certain Childermass would have noted things down, he was too clever and practical to assume England herself would always tell a magician what he needed to know.

“He disappeared with the Vinculus in 1873. He had been set to publish a work in five volumes called The King’s Legacy, but when he disappeared all his notes went with him.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, frowning. “The sum entirety of English magic that may be taught and practiced is less than fifty spells?”

She bit her lip. “Forty-seven is the official number.”

“And how many do you know?” He sounded tired, like a man who had carried a burden for many miles and knows he must carry it for many more.

She had never so despised her self as when she spoke next. “None. My parents didn’t want me to study magic. They,” she looked acutely embarrassed, “they thought it would scupper my chances of getting a husband.”

One of Strange’s eyebrows rose like a ponderous apostrophe. “Did they indeed?”

“Magic is a rather unusual occupation for a young lady. At least they think so. I had almost persuaded them to let me go to university so I might eventually teach it - magic that is. But then the war broke out, and teaching seemed a rather useless way to spend my time. So I became a nurse. Mostly I help Dr Turling with the neurasthenics.”

“The who?”

“They’re - they’re not mad exactly,” she said uncomfortably, “that isn’t really it - and they’re not cowards. They’re just… broken. The war broke them, even though no one can see it.”

Strange was regarding her, brow now lowered over a shrewd and piercing stare. “Has anything unusual ever happened?”

The cupid’s bow of her mouth pinched unhappily as she tried not to let the words out; but they tumbled from her tongue anyway, drawn to the magician like iron to a loadstone. “I know they’re broken because I can see the fractures in their eyes. The moon told me when Billy took the kitchen knife. Peter was able to talk again after I played the acorn game with him. I tied Johnny’s nightmares to a stick and dropped them in the river… he stopped screaming after that.” She couldn’t meet his eyes so stared at her hands instead, waiting for him to tell her that none of that was magic, it was a child’s fancy and she was a child for believing it.

“Did the moon sing?”

“I - I’m not sure. I don’t believe so. It was like a whisper.”

“Not _Chauntlucet_ then. What’s the acorn game?”

Her hands were now neurotic snakes intent on strangling one another. “You suck an acorn and put a memory inside it. When the bitterness of it fills your mouth and you think you might choke, you spit it out.”

Strange suddenly pointed a finger at her. “Madam, all of this is very natural magic!” It sounded like an accusation of sorts. “Your name isn’t Fairchild is it?” He was of course, wondering if she might claim faery blood in her ancestry. “Or there wasn’t some sort of family scandal back in the 1820s - or a sudden adoption perhaps?”

Her chin snapped up. “No! And my surname’s Dulac.”

“Du…?” He got no further than the first syllable before he started laughing. It was wild laughter that sounded like Spring and Autumn combined - a waltz of life and death and spiralling leaves. “Viviane Dulac,” he said at last a little breathlessly. “Do remind me,” he muttered to the world in general, “when I meet his august Northern majesty, to berate him on his sense of humour - or at least on his naming of spell components… Into my heart an air that kills - what is that?” he demanded suddenly.

_“Into my heart an air that kills_  
_From yon far country blows:_  
_What are those blue remembered hills,_  
_What spires, what farms are those?_  
_That is the land of lost content,_  
_I see it shining plain,_  
_The happy highways where I went_  
_And cannot come again,”_ she recited quietly. “It’s from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ - it’s a book of poetry by A E Houseman.”

“A Shropshire lad,” he repeatedly hollowly.

“Miss Hyde gave a copy of it to her elder brother - it was a favourite of hers. But she can’t read it now without weeping. Not since he died at Ypres.”

The magician for a moment looked almost as corpse-ish as Miss Hyde’s poor brother, but a deranged fury lit his eyes and lent his face some animation, however alarming. “Get dressed,” he told her.

“Where are we going?”

“To war.” He spun away after he’d said it, standing with his back to her. Had it been anyone else she would have felt discomforted in the extreme, but she did not suppose that the usual rules of propriety applied to Regency gentleman magicians who’s spent a century in the Other Lands. Beside, he had taken a little brass tin from his coat pocket and was studying it intently. “Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows,” he muttered.

Viviane hurried into her stockings, callots and blouse before scrambling for her shoes, hat and coat. “But I don’t - I don’t know anything about magic! Surely a Professor - or someone from the Bodleian - they’re who you need?”

He glanced at her as she struggled to slip on her shoe. “Don’t think I don’t recognise fate now when I see it,” he uttered with an ironical air. “Although,” he added to no one in particular, “if there is to be imprisonment within rocks or trees I shall be most unimpressed. My liberty’s been curtailed enough for several lifetimes…”

“Why are you speaking of rocks and trees?”

“Have you not read Mallory’s _Mort de Arthur?”_

She shook her head.

He snorted and his smile was wry. “Perhaps that is just as well. Are you ready?”

He asked it in such a brisk manner that it did not occur to her to make the usual sort of objections: she had not told her parents or Sister Haplocke she was leaving, she did not have an overnight bag with nightdress, flannel, clean shirt and toothbrush, she hadn’t said goodbye to Billy or Hugh… “Yes,” she said. And then, “Where are we going?”

“Hurtfew first - there are things I must collect. And Norrell must be made to understand the severity of the situation. Then Downing Street - I need to speak to the First Lord of the Treasury. Who is that currently?”

“The Prime Minister? Lloyd George.”

“After Downing Street we’ll need to be somewhere in Belgum - Flanders perhaps...”

“Flanders?” she repeated in a very small voice. “Mr Strange… I do not know if I can go to war,” she said truthfully, loathing herself for a coward even as she spoke.

He bestowed upon her one of those peculiar, ironical and canted smiles again, sorry and sarcastic at the edges. “Truth be owned, neither did I at first. But trust me, Miss Dulac, I’ve found Bellona to be a very keen instructrix.”

* * *

In June of 1917, Norrell updated the Quiver, furnishing the British forces with a further twelve reliable spells of practical use in modern warfare - four of which dealt with restoration and healing and lead to the founding of a sub-division of the Red Cross made entirely of female magicians who called themselves The Order of the White Poppy and knew how to staunch blood, dull pain, mend limbs and (imperfectly) restore flesh.

Strange and Viviane Dulac did workings at Arras, forestalling the whitestar shells, so the phosgene and chlorine gas never reached the Allied lines. They worked too at Messines and Passchendaele destroying the enemy field artillery. Viviane was wounded in the latter battle and lost the use of her left eye. (There are some accounts of the battle that said Strange lost his reason and summoned all the battlefield dead to rise and fight for the Allied forces, commanded too the stumps of trees to grow again and smash the machine guns, and forced the mustard gas to rise from the soil and become caustic animate ghosts that purposefully ate through barbed wire, rifles and shell cases but refused to touch any living person. It is doubtful that even half those tales are true.) 

On August 4th Strange and Vivaine did a working of the utmost secrecy, referred to in dispatches as ‘The Grail’. It has been commonly supposed to be a spell that ensured victory for the Allied Forces. The only things known about it for certain was that Norrell aided them from Hurtfew, and that the spell centred around a small brass tin. All information on it remains a state secret. Whatever the purpose of the magic, it is certain that the summer of 1917 proved a turning point for the Allied forces and made the Flanders Offensive possible, leading to the Hundred Day Offensive and finally, the signing of the Armistice on November 11th, 1918.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whilst I'm tempted to write more detailed chapters of all the work Strange, Norrell, Vivaine and the army Merlins did during WWI (as well as more about the short-lived 1817-20 Revival of English Magic)... I'm not going to, as it might just kill me. (Nothing has the capacity to mess me up faster than WWI.) Anyway. I hope you enjoyed it and didn't find Miss Dulac too irritating.


End file.
